Institutional Repositories: A Review of Content Recruitment Strategies.

The Institutional Repositories movement has attracted great attention from academic libraries worldwide over the past several years, often as a way of furthering the cause of Open Access to scholarship. The appeal is immediate and apparent. An Institutional Repository is a way for every academic institution to 'showcase' its intellectual prowess through the systematic collection, organization, making accessible and preservation of its intellectual output. Moreover, the linking of individual repositories has the potential of developing a true knowledge network where the researcher can "harvest" relevant material from any number of repositories across the world. Such an initiative is in the finest traditions of international scholarly collaboration - and libraries would play a central part. As part of its Institutional Repositories initiative the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has conducted an international review of content recruitment strategies for populating Institutional Repositories. This paper presents the results of the review and discusses some conclusions to be drawn. The findings will be generally applicable and should be of interest to any library that has, or is contemplating, implementing an Institutional Repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]