By Yeo Pin Pin
Abstract:
An institutional repository (IR) was launched in 2010 for a university in Singapore. The motivations for setting up an IR were to disseminate the research output through open access, to promote the university and researchers, and to help increase their research impact. Some quantitative and qualitative performance indicators were selected and used to measure the success of the IR. For the review and the performance indicators, the data used came from the IR at Singapore Management University (SMU), interviews with faculty members, and a study of a set of journal articles available in the IR to test a hypothesis. The results of the evaluation of the IR using various indicators were presented, and the factors that were successful in building the IR were having a workflow process between the research information system and the repository, having effective promotional activities, leveraging on institutional policies and research funder requirements to obtain full text, and proactively searching for full text. Some of the success factors and performance indicators might be of interest to other institutions to consider when implementing and evaluating an IR.
Keywords: Institutional repositories, academic libraries, evaluation, performance indicators, strategies, content recruitment