Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia
Abstract
An Institutional Repository (IR) is a set of services and technologies that provide the means to collect, manage, provide access to, disseminate, and preserve digital materials produced at an institution (Shreeves and Cragin, 2008). The take up of IR technologies in universities has been broadly contemporaneous with the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, beginning with the release of the first usable system, DSpace, in 2002. Since 2002, IRs have moved from academia to government, museums and corporations. Today, IRs are increasingly seen as a key component of the ‘networked information economy’ (Benkler, 2006). In many institutions, libraries are assuming program responsibility for institutional repositories
