| Over the last decade Institutional repositories have winged up in Academic institutions to
provide archival storage and dissemination services for locally-authored digital scholarship, primarily
in the form of the traditional peer-reviewed article. Libraries around the world are building up their own
Institutional repository centre using a variety of software packages for digital asset and content
management and also collect, preserve and provide access to these digital objects. However the
implementation of IR's has not rapidly changed the landscape of scholarly communication as expected
and without institutional deposit mandates, many remain underused for their primary purpose. Today, a
shift is occurring in academia that has signaled an increased need for the stewardship of digital research
data, for example, the expectation by federal funding agencies that researchers share their data and plan
for preservation and long-term access. The IR provides academic libraries a ready opportunity to assist
researchers with digital data preservation using their established repository services, particularly where
national and disciplinary data centers are not available. At the University UNISWA our IR is based on
DSpace software. This paper will highlight the policy decisions, user-needs assessments, and technical
infrastructure plans for building up the Institutional repositories (IR) to meet data archiving needs
across the campuses. |