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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the status of institutional repositories (IRs) in the South Asian region. The various characteristic features of IRs are studied. Design/methodology/approach: Open directory of open access repositories (DOAR) as a data-gathering tool was consulted for extracting the desired data. Findings: India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh lead other South Asian nations in terms of IRs count. Majority of the IRs are operational in nature with higher number of operational IRs from India. In terms of record count, India leads the list. "Journal articles" outscore other content type and majority of the IRs have OAI-PMH as their base URL. DSpace stays a prioritized software for content management in IRs. Majority of the IRs have not defined their content management policies. English stays a prioritized language of the content dotting the South Asian IRs and majority of the IRs not providing usage statistics. A good score of IRs has incorporated Web 2.0 tools in them with RSS as the preferred Web 2.0 tool. A good count of the IRs has not customized their interface. Majority of the IRs have interface in two languages. Research limitations/implications: The main limitation of the study is that the findings of the research are based on the data collected through the repositories indexed by Open DOAR. Originality/value: The study tries to explore the characteristic features of IRs from the South Asian region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this study is to assess the quality and performance of South and East Asian Open Access Library and Information Science Repositories. The study is segmented into four parts; the first is devoted to quality assessment, and the second is the repositories' performance using the web analysis tool Nibbler and Alexa. In the third segment, the Revised Web Impact Factors (RWIF) were calculated, and the final part represents the Ranking of the repositories in terms of visibility, transparency, and excellence. The results indicate that the Chinese Institutional Repository of the Chinese Academy of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, and the Peking University Institutional Repository ranked the first and the second, respectively, with Japanese repositories ranking the last. "Taiwan's Chaoyang University of Technology Institutional Repository" has the most comprehensive collection of resources with varying levels of availability of resources in terms of quality assurance indicators. The authors of this paper are in the dire belief that this study may aid administrators in determining the repositories' strengths and weaknesses to enhance their quality and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the utility as well as the limitations of various online research repositories for research in South Asian history and then discusses the immense possibilities offered for such research by Taylor and Francis’South Asia Archive. Digital databases like HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, ArchiveGrid, the British Online Archives, etc. turn up some useful material, but none of them matches up to the description of a real ‘archive,’ either for the scholar looking for rare material, or for the student seeking to learn the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the historian’s craft by delving into a large repository of primary sources. TheSouth Asia Archive, on the other hand, provides easy accessibility and navigability to a vast body of original documents straddling different genres – official reports, censuses and gazetteers, rare books, journals and periodicals and much more. In addition to being an invaluable scholarly resource, it can be an immensely powerful tool for classroom teaching by integrating an archival experience – though digital – into the course content. This augurs well for the development of the hitherto un(der)explored area of undergraduate research in India and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]