“An institutional repository (IR) is an electronic system that captures, preserves, and provides access to the digital work products of a community. In a university setting, an IR may provide a place for faculty work, student theses and dissertations, e-journals, datasets and so on. Whatever the particular focus of the university IR, to be successful it must be filled with scholarly work of enduring value that is searched and cited.
Based on the number of institutional repositories established over the past few years, the IR service appears to be quite attractive and compelling to institutions. IRs provide an institution with a mechanism to showcase its scholarly output, centralize and introduce efficiencies to the stewardship of digital documents of value, and respond proactively to the escalating crisis in scholarly communication….
Installing the software, however, is just the first step towards a successful IR. Without content, an IR is just a set of empty shelves. And, in spite of the rapid pace at which organizations are establishing IRs, the quantity of content deposited into them remains quite modest. An April 2004 survey of 45 IRs found the average number of documents to be only 1,250 per repository, with a median of 290. This is a small number when considering the hundreds of thousands of dollars and staff hours that go into establishing and maintaining an IR. For example, MIT Libraries estimate that their IR will cost $285,000 annually in staffing, operating expenses, and equipment escrow. With approximately 4,000 items currently in their IR, that is over $71 spent per item, per year….
MIT Libraries certainly have not been complacent in their endeavors to recruit content into their DSpace IR. As part of the DSpace rollout on campus, MIT hired a DSpace User Support Manager in order to work, in part, on content recruitment. When this strategy failed to reap the quantity of documents expected, the skills of a marketing expert were sought. Something seems amiss when even MIT, which has arguably the highest-profiled IR, and which has received national and international press, struggles to recruit content.
The phrase ‘if you build it, they will come’ does not yet apply to IRs. While their benefits seem to be very persuasive to institutions, IRs fail to appear compelling and useful to the authors and owners of the content. And, without the content, IRs will not succeed, because institutions will sustain IRs for only so long without greater evidence of success.”
More at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html