Repositories

Institutional and disciplinary repositories serve multiple functions, with the common goal of making selected educational and research materials readily accessible, for free, to the public. They are, therefore, a growing source of open access content. Hundreds of repositories now exist, offering millions of digital learning objects, visual and audio files, research papers, dissertations, masters' theses, scholarly works, data and manuscripts.

Not all content in repositories are open access, however. Scholars may choose to restrict access to a selective group of collaborators or colleagues, or use the institutional repository as a data storage site for active projects that are not ready for public view.

Oberlin is participating in the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons (DRC), now in development stage. Two collections from Oberlin faculty are already accessible in the OhioLINK Digital Media Center (DMC): Bruce Simonson's geology digital photographs and Linda Grimm's Mayan archeology digital photographs. The DMC will be one of the components of the DRC when the latter is fully developed.

We are exploring digitization of student honor theses from selected academic departments for deposit in the DRC. Other OhioLINK institutions are depositing dissertations and masters theses, and the DRC offers a platform for peer-reviewed, edited scholarly journals as well as collaborative space for research groups.

Contact Associate Director of Libraries Alan Boyd for more information.

Imporant Disciplinary Repositories:

• PubMed Central Life sciences, plus all NIH-funded research effective April 2008.
• ArXiv Physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology & statistics

Other Resources

• "Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite" by Charles Bailey
• Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Resolver
  This service translates a DOI and provides a link where you can find the full-text of an article for which you only know the Digital Object Identifier.
• Eprints for Digital Repositories