On 15 Sep 2006, at 13:08, Theo Andrew wrote:
> Congratulations Simon on passing the 1000 item milestone. Hopefully
> many
> more repositories in the UK will pass this figure soon!
According to ROAR, there are 10 Research Institutional or
Departmental Repositories in the UK which have more than a thousand
items deposited in them.
http://archives.eprints.org/?
country=uk&version=&type=institutional&order=recordcount&submit=Filter
This is a welcome development, and should be celebrated throughout
the land! Many institutions have invested a lot of effort over a
number of years to produce credible and creditable Institutional
Repositories.
However, it is probably better to think in terms of fractions of
gross institutional research output per annum than it is in absolute
numbers. If an institution has about 1000 researchers who each write
about 1 article per term (but collaborate so that an average of three
authors share a paper) then we should expect a figure of around 1K
articles deposited per annum or about 100 deposits per month.
Of the 49 Research Institutional or Departmental Repositories in the
UK (according to ROAR), about 1/3 of them are performing at this
level, although some of the biggest repositories managed only a
handful of deposits in the last month. In fact, the health
(sustainability?) of a repository can be determined more accturately
from the thumbnail graphs in the ROAR page above than from a single
figure of size. A healthy repository has a gradual slope that is
sustained for a long period. Watch out for sudden leaps in the size
of a repository preceded and followed by an almost horizontal line -
this is the telltale sign of a little-used repository which gets
batch inputs from an external (legacy?) system. Although legacy data
is no bad thing, flatlining is a sign that the repository's
constituency are not depositing in it on a regular basis, and hence
that the repository has not yet achieved internal institutional support.
--
Les Carr
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