Title: Management of InstitutionalRepositories (IR) inDeveloping Countries
Abstract: The chapter discusses the management of institutional repositories (IR) in developing countries. It starts with
the introduction of the concept of institutional repositories and its origin. Various definitions of institutional
repositories are highlighted. The chapter goes further to discuss the features of institutional repositories such
as infrastructure, hosted service, customer support, content organization and control, content discovery,
publication tools, reporting, multimedia, social features and notifications, and so on. It further analyses vital
issues in management of institutional repositories. Peculiar issues in open access for developing countries are
also identified and discussed. The chapter covers the roles of libraries and librarians in the management of
institutional repositories; the roles include collection development and management, software acquisition and
training, formulation of guidelines for standard metadata and catalogue system, assessment of submission for
standard and quality, persuading authors to contribute their intellectual works, enlightenment on copyright
issues, information literacy in the use of institutional repositories, promotion and marketing of institutional
repositories. The chapter further highlights the challenges and intervention strategies in the management
of institutional repositories in developing countries; it enumerates the challenges to include: personnel and
technical staff, ICT equipment and infrastructure, lack of awareness and advocacy, inadequate funding, poor
policy guidelines, poor power supply, open access, software, copyright law and inadequate internet bandwidth.
Based on these, the chapter recommends that an aggressive enlightenment programme should be carried out
from time to time; developing countries and their higher institutions should wake up to their responsibilities
by formulating policies on institutional repositories (IR); developing countries should also come together to
form consortia in the areas of software selection and deployment for institutional repositories. Management
of institutions in these countries should make funds available for the smooth running of their institutional
repositories, and so on. The chapter concludes with the need for academic institutions and their libraries to
pay more attention to the funding and development of institutional repositories in order to provide more effective
and efficient access to digital information services to the global academic community.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
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