ECMs and Institutional Repositories. The Case for a Unified Enterprise Approach to Content Management

Universities are currently developing responses to manage the explosion of research content. There is an expectation by these institutions as well as governments, funding agencies and other stakeholders that research data will be well managed, available and accessible to users as appropriate. The large enterprise content management (ECM) platform vendors are evolving into “information management frameworks”. The ECM solutions being marketed by these vendors are underpinned by content repositories, promising to manage all of the enterprise’s digital assets. One might logically question whether a university actually needs separate institutional repositories (IR) systems and infrastructure such as DSpace, for example, to manage research data. If these new enterprise solutions overcome the historical shortcomings traditionally associated with research content, then what is the future of the IR? The implementation of SharePoint along with new research data services at Griffith University has been a catalyst for beginning to question some of the fundamental paradigms which have underpinned the current thinking about an enterprise approach to research infrastructure and the role of research repositories. Having conducted a literature review, the authors outline the roles of enterprise content management systems and institutional repositories in the context of strategies, processes, and technologies rather than as single products. The focus is on architecture and a management approach rather than technological solutions. This paper explores the synergies between institutional repositories and enterprise content management systems and how research content would fit within the traditional enterprise content management system model. It concludes that there are major benefits in taking a unified enterprise approach to managing research content within a university