Content growth of institutional repositories in South India: a status report

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to evaluate the content growth of institutional repositories (IR) in South India and analyse the type-wise growth of items available in these IRs and also discuss the traits and trends exposed by them.Design/methodology/approachWith the help of Registry of Open Access Repositories and Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), 39 repositories were located in south India. From these, Personal websites, the IRs that are currently not working and the repositories used for journal archiving were excluded. A total of 22 operational IRs at 21 institutions were identified for the study. Within a 15 month period, the data were collected from the 22 IRs twice for monitoring content growth.FindingsThe content of nearly all IRs have grown over the 15 month period, and the overall content growth rate was 7.82 per cent. Journal articles were the important content type of IRs, while thesis and conference papers were the next common. Moreover, item monographs exhibited the highest growth rate. Other categories, conference proceedings, and conference papers also exhibited a high growth rate. The present study revealed that Indian repositories were actively engaged in data curation activities, depositing a wide variety of items in their respective IRs. Overall, South Indian repositories exhibited a slow growth rate and tended to become inactive. Most South Indian Universities had not constituted the IRs, which led to the dominance of English language material in these IRs.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was conducted only in South Indian IRs.Originality/valueThis is the first study in India, attempting to determine the type-wise growth of items in IRs.