Date submitted: 24/05/2009 Subject Librarians ' Perceptions of the Institutional Repository as an Information Source

This paper focuses on the key results of an exploratory study of nine New Zealand academic subject librarians’ perceptions of the institutional repository (IR) as an information source for their clients. IRs are a relatively recent and rapidly growing innovation in open access among academic and research libraries. The growth of IRs in numbers and size, however, is only a part of the equation for measuring the rate of institutional adoption of IRs. The role of IRs is both to store and to make accessible the digital research materials created within an institution. 1 While the majority of IR studies have been investigating factors affecting why researchers decide whether to store or not store the content of their output in an IR, little research has been done about the access side of the equation. The success of the access component involves not only the information seekers’ ability to locate relevant items in an IR – it also includes a prior element – knowledge of the existence of the IR and its potential value as a source of information for resolving information needs. Subject librarians have an important role to play in promoting an institution’s IR if it is to be identified by information seekers as a potential source of information. This study has used Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) Theory for its conceptual framework. The DOI theory identifies five key attributes of an innovation that affect its rate of adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, observability and complexity. The theory also contends that the rate of adoption is affected by the