Five years of the Raman Research Institute digital repository: Some lessons and reflections

Abstract

The changing landscape of scholarly communication and the proliferation of electronic resources have given rise to the open access movement and institutional repositories. Librarians have been actively disseminating the intellectual output of their organizations through institutional repositories and thus have been playing a key role in the scholarly communication process.

Keeping in view the importance and benefits of an institutional repository, we launched the RRI Digital Repository in early 2006. Five years later this has grown into an omnibus repository containing more than 3750 documents. Our repository now contains all of the research papers published since the institute was established (1948 to date) and also covers historical materials about the institute and its founder C.V. Raman, a Nobel Laureate. When we look at its growth and development during the last five years, we feel that it has many lessons for all of us. We discuss some of them in this paper.