Archival Material and IRs

[Jason Skoog]

Hello,

Does your institutional repository only contain ETDs, or does it also contain archival material related to your institution?

At our university, we refer to our ETDs as our institutional repository. This is housed within our larger digital archival collections, which contains collections of archival material related to the university, like the school newspaper and historical images. These types of materials are not considered part of our IR.

I was reading The Complete Guide to Institutional Repositories, and it sounds like universities vary, and some consider the historical material to be part of the IR. I was just wondering what others' thoughts were.

Jason Skoog

Viterbo University
Archives and Systems Librarian | Library
608-796-3262
Murphy Center 128

 

viterbo.edu | 900 Viterbo Drive, La Crosse, WI 54601

 

The Viterbo University community prepares students for faithful service and ethical leadership.

[Michelle Flinchbaugh]

Hi Jason,

Here we differentiate between our IR which is faculty and staff collections and our digital collections, which are historical collections and university archives. They are on different platforms (dSpace and ContentDM respectively). However, others in our consortium that use our shared dSpace repository include historical collections and university archives in our shared IR. The varying ways in which our institutions defined IRs was an issue we grappled with during the early days of developing our shared IR. I don't think one way is right and the other wrong, but it's important to understand how the use of the words vary from library to library and clarify what we're talking about to avoid miscommunication. In developing a shared repository that is being used in different ways by different libraries, we had to accommodate the different uses in our shared policies and practices.

Michelle

Michelle Flinchbaugh
Digital Scholarship Services Librarian (Open Access, ScholarWorks@UMBC, Copyright Information, Research Data, ORCID, and Scopus/Web of Science corrections)

UMBC Library
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250

Email: flin...@umbc.edu
Phone: 410-455-3544

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[Bailey, Jody Elizabeth]

Hi Jason,

 

Emory Libraries has three primary digital repositories:

1. OpenEmory is a scholarly works repository that initially (in 2012) accepted only faculty-authored journal articles. Since 2016, we have accepted unpublished conference papers and posters, technical reports and white papers, etc. – essentially any kind of scholarly work. We also more recently started accepting works not just from Emory faculty but also from grad students and undergrad students.
2. Emory Theses and Dissertations is self-explanatory.
3. Emory Digital Collections is a repository of digitized archival and special collections materials. This is where you’d find works pertaining to our institutional history. If you scroll down and click on the Collection facet, then click on More, you can see many collections from Emory’s history. I tried opening a few images, and they are currently not loading properly (everything looks very fuzzy when normally these images are high-res and super sharp unless we down-res and reduce the size to limit copyright risk). This problem must be related to the banner that’s currently up on the site saying, “We are currently experiencing intermittent problems with viewing some files.”
   
   

So, that’s how we have things organized here, but Michelle is correct when she says that every institution is different, and there’s no right way to go about setting things up. That said, there may be pros and cons. One disadvantage to our separate repositories is that you can’t search across all three repositories at one time.

 

Best regards,

 

Jody

 

Jody Bailey, MA, MLIS (she, her)

Head, Scholarly Communications Office

Emory University

jody....@emory.edu

Schedule an appointment with me

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4226-4173

I sometimes work flexibly and send emails outside normal office hours.

No need to respond to my emails outside yours.

 

From: Michelle Flinchbaugh <flin...@umbc.edu>
Sent: Monday, November 3, 2025 5:08 PM
To: Jason Skoog <jaskoo...@gmail.com>
Cc: ETD <e...@ndltd.org>
Subject: [External] Re: [etd] Archival Material and IRs

 

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