DEVELOPING AN ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY. THE CASE OF THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS

Abstract

The amount of digital content produced nowadays, is enormous. Academic institutions produce and make available a plethora of digital objects like research articles, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual collections and many others. In addition, academic libraries digitize materials to create collections of historical, political and scientific significance and are responsible for keeping, preserving, archiving and publishing the content produced by their students and academic personnel. Aiming in that direction, the Open University of Cyprus, an institution responsible for delivering distance learning at the Republic of Cyprus, designed and deployed “Kypseli” Institutional Repository. In this work, the authors depict the methodology and tools used for building an academic institutional repository using open source tools at the Open University of Cyprus. Moreover, the procedures used for publishing content and the integration of the repository to the rest of the university’s infrastructure are analysed, along with the challenges faced during the implementation and deployment phase. In addition, a number of metrics are presented, accompanied by statistics of usage.