Scholarly Communication in a Digital World: the Role of the Digital Repository

at the Raman Research Institute

Girija Srinivasan, Y.M. Patil and Jacob Rajan 

Raman Research Institute, Bangalore.

International Conference on Semantic Web & Digital Libraries (ICSD-2007), February 21-23, 2007,

Bangalore.

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

Birth of the RRI Digital Repository

We have a large collection of newspaper clippings about Raman dating back to the 1930s.

We have a complete set of all RRI papers in the pdf format from 1971.

We were keen to make all these documents accessible not only on our Intranet but also on the Internet. This way we could also support the Open-Access movement

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

RRI Digital Repository – some milestones

April 2005 – Test installation of DSpace

July 2005 – Dedicated server

March 2006 –The repository was launched on the internet

Registered with OAISTER and ROAR soon after.

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

Current Configuration of the RRI Digital Repository

As on 20th February 2007Home URL: http://dspace.rri.res.in/IR Software: Dspace Version 1.3.2

Software: CentOS 4.0 Linux, Apache Tomcat 5.5.9,

Apache Ant 1.6.5, PostgreSQL 8.0.0, Sun Java JDK 1.5.0_01

Server: Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz, 1GB RAM, 160GB SATA Mirrored Hard disks

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

Policies & Guidelines

Ours will be an Omnibus Repository containing different types of documents.

Any faculty member or student of RRI may submit/post documents.

But to start with, the project team (which comprises all the library staff) will add the documents to the repository after checking copyright clearance, correct format & metadata.

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

Policies & Guidelines (contd)

We will provide open access to the full-text of papers (in the permitted format) wherever possible.

Where this is not possible, we will restrict access to the full-text and make only the bibliographic details available. If possible, we will also provide a link to an alternative location, e.g. on a publisher’s site. 

In case an open-access version is available at arXiv.org or at any other website, we will give a link to it in the alternative location.

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

Content Development: the Biggest Challenge

At RRI, we have used the following strategies to develop content.

1. General promotional activities

2. Mediated depositing services

3. Content harvesting

4. Usage information

5. Self-archiving policies

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

1. General promotional activities

Personal interaction with several faculty and members of library committee.

Announcement through email and notice boards in RRI.

Online information is made available on the repository homepage.

Periodic emails about the progress made.

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

2. Mediated Deposit

At RRI, almost the entire content has been added by the project team on behalf of the authors

First to be added were the newspaper clippings

Next, papers whose publishers gave permission to host the published pdfs (Indian Academy of Sciences, American Physical Society, American Institute of Physics, IEEE)

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

3. Content Harvesting

Searching for articles which are already open-access in the web and adding them to the repository e.g.

Authors’ personal web pagesPublisher’s websitesNASA ADSarXiv.org

Even if we don’t have permission to host these articles on our repository, we have linked to the above alternative locations.

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

4. Usage/citation Information

Statistics are available on our repository page

We have future plans to implement the University of Minho statistics add-on

for more user-friendly statistics

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

5. Self-archiving policies

Many RRI authors have been following the self-archiving tradition established in the fields of physics and astronomy by depositing their papers in arXiv.org.

The earliest open-access RRI paper in arXiv.org is dated 1995!

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

Conclusions

It supports the open access movement and plays a vital role in the scholarly communication process;

It collects and preserves all the publications of the institute in a central place;

It adds one more dimension to the information services provided by the library.

ICSD-2007, Feb 21-23, Bangalroe

Thank you!