Town Hall Meeting on Institutional Repositories
Tuesday, April 13
4:30-6 pm
Peter McKenna Room
University Center

Hosted by Carnegie Mellon Faculty Senate and the University Libraries

Institutional repositories are an emerging trend among institutions of higher education. According to a recent EDUCAUSE report, “institutional repositories will become a significant focus of most higher education institutions within three years.”

Building on the grass-roots practice among faculty of posting their research online -- where it is likely to be cited five times as often as traditional print journal literature -- institutional repositories are touted as a strategic response to opportunities afforded by a digital networked environment and to systemic problems in the scholarly journal system. By providing a set of centralized, web-based services for organizing, managing, preserving, and providing open access to intellectual assets created by the campus community, an institutional repository purportedly would:

• Provide the broadest possible dissemination of the scholarship we produce
• Enhance the professional visibility of the faculty and the prestige of the institution
• Support teaching, research, and the development of online journals
• Improve scholarly communication
• Encourage innovation
• Provide a catalog of Carnegie Mellon's intellectual capital
• Remedy the weaknesses of current self-archiving practices

Is this hype or hope? How would an institutional repository work at Carnegie Mellon? What work would be required to create and sustain it? Why would we bother? Does Carnegie Mellon really want or need one?

Join us on April 13 to explore what an institutional repository might mean for Carnegie Mellon and to discuss how to determine whether the benefits would exceed the costs.