A Study of the Deployment of Institutional Repositories in Colleges and Universities in Connecticut

Abstract

In the past several years, many colleges and universities have developed institutional repositories as a means of highlighting the research and scholarship conducted at their institution as well as a means of combating the current publication model. Past studies have concentrated on growth in the total number of repositories, but none has looked at how the number of repositories in a particular region compares to those institutions without a repository. The primary purposes of this study were to find out how many colleges and universities in Connecticut have developed institutional repositories and how they have used these institutional repositories. Overall, this study revealed that less than a third of the academic institutions in Connecticut have institutional repositories. These repositories are most frequently found in the state sponsored universities and the independent, nonprofit schools. On the other hand, none of the community colleges, which constitute one of the largest proportion of schools in the state behind independent, nonprofits, has a repository. A vast majority of the repositories are registered with OpenDOAR, and nearly all of them use Digital Commons as their platform. The two most popular types of content found in Connecticut institutional repositories are journal articles and theses & dissertations