An Institutional Repository Model for the Humanities

Abstract

Institutional repositories of research output look set to become an integral part of future scholarly communication as recommended by the recent House of Commons Select Committee Report. The model proposed by the TARDis (Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure) project in the University of Southampton is driven by user needs. A core requirement is for one input that can generate many outputs. The TARDis approach encourages good citation metadata for the deposit via a structured deposit process - providing a means to help this happen. The project is also exploring the best balance of author self archiving and assisted deposit to aid the process. ‘e-Prints Soton’ will become a publications database of all research output with full text provided whenever available - the situation with regard to copyright and publishers is changing rapidly. The resulting broad record of research is useful for research reporting and proposals, for CVs and local web sites as well as providing full text for immediate visibility in many cases.
Early depositors have found creative opportunities for presenting the breadth of their research adding supplementary material for example, if a journal has limits on what it can accept. An environmental assessment at Southampton showed the potential for adding Humanities material. Moreover, the publications database approach enables ‘for profit’ material to be recognised as well. The EPrints software can provide enriched functionality such as by adding book or monograph cover images and by linking to booksellers such as Amazon. The institutional repositories need to represent the whole output of the university and not just the technical disciplines. They can provide new ways for promoting humanities research through OAI (Open Archive Initiative) compliant databases and by greater accessibility via search engines. Powerful new uses and linkages within the whole scholarly communication process will emerge as more research is made visible in this way.

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ORCID for Leslie Carr: orcid.org/0000-0002-2113-9680

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