Abstract
Institutional repositories (IR) are largely unpopulated due to insufficient faculty experience in self-archiving (Kim, 2010), to inadequate marketing efforts to popularize the advantages of IRs (Jantz & Wilson, 2008), and to lack of faculty awareness regarding the unsustainable costs of traditional means of scholarly communication (Darnton, 2010). This paper explores a number of IR services at Rutgers that, collectively, add significant value to the university’s IR by facilitating scholarly communication and by preserving digital content. These services are based on a flexible architecture, enabling the customization of IR content for specific communities including discipline specific dissertation portals and personalized faculty portals. Related services have been developed, in part, to increase the visibility of faculty publications, including support for internal interoperability among multiple databases (for example, between an IR and a library’s OPAC) and for the export of faculty-deposited works to external databases such as PubMed Central. Future services will include collaborative spaces, science data archiving and curation, and the creation of semantic relationships that connect scholarly materials in multiple repositories. In this paper, we argue that faculty members are frequently unaware of these additional services that can simultaneously enhance the impact of their work while advancing the development of powerful new means of scholarly communication. Harnessing faculty self interest to these technological innovations is the surest mechanism for creating a bridge to the sustainable development of high quality research and a major factor in the success of institutional repositories.