Institutional Repository

What is an institutional repository?

"A university based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation, as well as organization and access or distribution. A key part of the services that comprise an institutional repository is the management of technological changes and the migration of digital content from one set of technologies to the next. An institutional repository is not simply a fixed set of software and hardware.

"At the most basic and fundamental level, an institutional repository is a recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship of our university will increasingly be represented, documented and shared in digital form and that a primary responsibility of our university is to exercise stewardship – both to make them available and to preserve them."

Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age, Clifford Lynch.
(ARL Bimonthly Report 226 February 2003)

Faculty, staff and students of the University produce high quality scholarly research and communication that needs to be organized, documented and shared in digital form. The university recognizes the need for stewardship of the digital record of its intellectual life and scholarship, both for access and for preservation. To that end, UR became a member of the LASR Project (Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository), a collaborative arrangement among many members of NITLE, the National Initiative for Technology in Liberal Education. The purpose of the repository is to showcase and increase access to the scholarly output of our undergraduate and graduate students, with the hope that faculty will also take advantage of this opportunity to increase access to their research.

LASR is a DSpace repository hosted by NITLE under an agreement with the Longsight Group. Like other institutional repositories, LASR is not intended to be a substitute for traditional peer-reviewed publication, and is intended solely to increase access to the scholarly output of the university’s members (copyright permissions permitting) and to facilitate information sharing and collaboration between scholars where possible.