Introduction: Metadata and Open Access Repositories

Tyler O. Walters says, “In many ways, when libraries create institutional repositories (IRs), they are reinventing themselves. Traditionally, libraries have managed information produced by organizations—namely publishers—outside of their parent institutions. They select, acquire, organize, make accessible, promote, preserve, and instruct people about how to use these information resources. However, IR developers are primarily concerned with content generated internally—that is, with the intellectual output (usually in digital form) of their university communities.”1 He goes on to describe cataloging and technical services units as the “inputting ‘armies’ ready to serve.” However, it is just as likely that librarians and library staff outside cataloging departments will create metadata or otherwise catalog and describe the objects contained in these institutional or subject-based repositories. The authors in this issue include computer scientists, library and information science faculty, digital librarians, and also catalogers. They are all describing, organizing, distributing, and preserving the research and pedagogical works contained in these repositories, and many have developed tools to work with and analyze the metadata contained therein. The theme of this special issue, “metadata and open access repositories,” is at once broad and extremely specialized. It includes discussions of metadata to describe research data, electronic theses and dissertations, learning objects, and scholarly articles. Several case studies present workflows for acquiring, describing, and disseminating digital content in repositories. The authors discuss many well-known repository systems, including ContentDM, DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, Greenstone, Opus, XTF, and homegrown systems. While various “flavors” of Dublin Core are the most common metadata