DIGITAL REPOSITORIES : NEW NETWORKS FOR UNIVERSITIES & SCIENTISTS

Abstract

Digital Repositories exist in various forms. They represent collections of digital objects stored, made available for use and “archived” according to the policies and goals of the repository sponsors. In general, a digital repository can be defined as an electronic archive of digital resources collected a) by a certain institution, b) on a specific subject or person, or c) created by (belonging to) a certain person, institution, or legal body. Digital repositories range from electronic text archives, such as those of publishers for their electronic book, text book, journals and reference works offerings, or of universities or national libraries for electronic dissertation servers. Digital repositories may contain files or electronic texts (only) or be combined with files of electronic images, such as digital image archives with digital still and moving images. Such combinations could also represent the repositories of an art gallery, online exhibition, museum site, or even newspaper server. Subject repositories focus primarily on texts, but often also include various other information formats such as images, datasets, etc. The key aspect here is that everything in a subject repository relates to the subject focused upon and has been collected within the scope of the collection description or policy by the repository host(s). This can also represent a network of repositories connected by a common metadata harvesting protocol which in turn has the requirement of having a common agreement among the contributing data providers that they index items using the standard Open Archives Metadata and make them 250 Diann Pelz Rusch available via the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). Subject repositories may also include metadata for non-digital items in order to provide a comprehensive overview of information items available, even those non-digital items.