Digital Libraries and Institutional Repositories: Building a New Delivery Framework

Abstract

Librarians invented concepts and established standards so that principles of organisation could be applied to stores of knowledge. This paper considers how the move from physical to digital stores has created new imperatives for academic libraries and considers the roles institutional repositories will play in the development of new services. Institutional repositories are being used to capture original research and other intellectual property generated by an institution's constituent population. We should not limit our thinking of this digital material as only being recognisable units of research outputs – the easily managed published material that forms the final link in the scholarly communications chain. Academic Libraries will need to develop a better understanding of ways in which scholarship and learning are created, used, reused and preserved in the digital environment. How our users interact with each other and with information resources have undergone a fundamental change. Changes in the way data, information and knowledge are gathered, shared and disseminated are determining the types of services libraries will have to support. This paper will look at the elements of these two areas of developments (the rise and rise of institutional repositories and how our users gather, create and disseminate information) and outline the development roadmap UNSW Library is undertaking to ensure the services we build are relevant to our users.