Institutional repository policies: best practices for encouraging self-archiving

Abstract

Over the past year, many Institutional Repositories have been launched by Greek Universities. In this framework, the Library of the Technological Educational Institute of Athens has designed and is launching an Institutional Repository containing Faculty's published and unpublished work, students’ theses and a major “Institutional Archival Collection”. However, the library had a long history of mistrust, mainly deriving from its long periods of understaffing and poor services. Thus, it was evident that the Institute had to rebuild trust and promote the IR. The first step in launching IRs was to set up policies regarding the content, the self-archiving procedure, the use of personalized services for users and the introduction of relevant routines. In the process, it became apparent that the organizational culture had to be redesigned. These lead to the formulation of ‘best practices’ which would secure the effective and widespread use of the repository by all members of the academic community. A bibliographic review was carried out regarding repository policies. In addition, observation techniques were used in assessing the use of the repository. Furthermore, a questionnaire was distributed to users in order to assess the effectiveness, ease of use and level of understanding of the repository's functions.