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This afternoon there was a set of presentations about services that are developed and offered for Institutional Repositories. I have tried to aggregate & summarize the services below from the work of Joan Giesecke , Paul Royster, Hideki Uchijima, and Norbert Lossau:

• Permissioning – figuring out for faculty what the access permissions on their publications are. Working with them to archive their materials in accordance with copyright and contracts
• Hunting and Gathering – using Romeo and Sherpa websites, find archivable articles. Contact faculty and ask them if you can archive their publications. Lead with “I recently saw your article on …” 🙂
• Scanning – Digitize stuff that is in print
• Typesetting – Provide an IR specific, professional layout for articles. Ensures consistency of IR items, looks good for authors, looks good for library. Pay attention to layout, pagination, etc.
• Metadata – Provide good description for the items archived.
• Uplodad/Post – Take what the faculty can give you, do the heavy lifting for them.
• Usage Reporting – Give them feedback on how much their work is being accessed – “Your article was downloaded x times…” Paul Royster reported that on a monthly basis over 75% of their open access content was downloaded at least once.
• Promoting – post on wikipedia, online books page, worldcat, subject/discipline based websites
• Inclusion of IR in open URL services
• Faculty profile page – Provide automated faculty profile page including selected works, summary of research, profile, etc. This gives them visibility and allows them to forward requests for documents to a single place
• Aggregate – More of an institutional/research service – make your repository open for harvesting, use OAI services to find like content and create a search interface to other repositories.
• Access – Make your repository available to your institution’s Open URL resolver

Of note was the fact that the provision of these services and the growth of the IRs in the presentations resulted in a decrease in ILL requests for non-returnable items, presumably through increased access of articles online. This came from Hideki Uchijima’s presentation and it appears that the implementation of IRs in Japan has been much more widespread than it is in the US (I wonder what the NIH mandate may do for this).

There was also a presentation on a new set of IR services called DRIVER (http://www.driver-repository.eu/Driver-About/About-DRIVER.html). The DRIVER software was particularly interesting because it focused on the provision of distributed IR services through an open SOA model. The services DRIVER defines and supports are:

• User Services – Search, Collect, Profile, Recommend
• Collective Services – Aggregate, Index, Browser
• Presentation Services – User Interface, OAI-PMH
• Enabling Services – Authentication/Authorization, Manager, Information

During the disucssion, some other intersting services that came up were:

• Transformation – providing the ability to represent and re-represent IR documents in different formats
• Version differentiation – how/or do we need to educate our end users on the implications of what a document in an IR is versus what that same intellectual content might be in a proprietary database.

There were some interesting services that did not get mentioned – Nothing about social software (contribute, stream, tag, comment, annotate, link), nothing about preservation (except perhaps transformation), nothing about learning or instructional services.