A Pilot Survey of the Numbers of Full-Text Items in Institutional Repositories
Background A recent post on How Do We Measure the Effectiveness of Institutional Repositories? sought to address the question of “ What makes a good repository?” which was raised on the JISC-Repositories JISCMail list . The post outlined possible metrics which could be used for identifying the effectiveness of institutional repositories based on the intended purposes of a repository.
In the post I suggested that if the purpose of a repository was to ensure the long-term preservation of resources, then there was a need to measure the number of full-text items in the repository – after all if the full text of a paper is not available the repository won’t be doing a very good job in the preservation of such resources! The interest in this topic was revisited yesterday in a Twitter discussion which began with the suggestion from @PaulWalk that “ I’ve thought we should use RepUK to measure actual persistence in repositories “‘.
But in order to measure the persistence of of the actual resource we need to be able to differentiate between the persistence of the full-text item and the resource itself and not just the persistency of the URI of the item. How might one do this? Initial Experimentation Following a discussion with Les Carr at the JISC 2011 conference I discovered that the ePrints advanced search interface can be used to retrieve information on both the numbers of items containing the full text and those that do not.
In order to see if this approach could be used I looked at UKOLN’s items in Opus , the University of Bath’s institutional repository. From this I found that there were a total of 344 items , of which 146 full text items were available (including published and confidential items) and 198 are metadata-only items . We can see that 42% of the items contain the full-text.
In order to see if this this use of ePrint’s advanced search could be used in a similar fashion for another repository I looked at the ECS ePrint Repository at the University of Southampton. This time I found that out of a total of 974 15,532 items the departmental repository contained 861 8,429 items with the full text and 113 7.093 metadata-only items – this time 54.3% of items contain the full-text.
But are these initial findings typical across the sector? Survey Across Russell Group University Repositories We might expect the 20 research-intensive Russell Group Universities to be playing a leading role in use of institutional repositories, with either institutional mandates (in the case of Southampton University) or institutional research culture helping to ensure that significant numbers of full-text items are deposited.
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But is this really the case? In order to investigate whether the approach described could be applied more widely the survey was carried out across Russell Group Universities.
Using the list of repositories taken from the OpenDOAR directory I found that 3 of the Russell group Universities seem to use the DSpace repository software and the advanced search functional in DSpace does not appear to allow searching to be restricted to full-text and metadata-only records. Subsequent investigation of the advanced search capabilities of the remaining 17 institutions showed that only two seemed to provide the advanced search function which I used on the University of Bath and ECS, University of Southampton repositories.
However there is a RESTful interface to the search and so the search parameters used to search the University of Bath repository was used across the other ePrint repositories. The following searches were carried out: Query 1: Total Number of Items http:// eprint.domain /cgi/search/quicksearch?screen=Public%3A%3AEPrintSearch&basic_merge=ALL&basic=web&full_text_status=public&full_text_status=restricted&full_text_status=none&groups_merge=ALL&satisfyall=ALL&order=-date%2Fcreators_name%2Ftitle&_action_search=Search Query 2: Full text deposited (but access may be restricted) http:// eprint.domain /cgi/search/quicksearch?screen=Public%3A%3AEPrintSearch&basic_merge=ALL&basic=web&full_text_status=public&full_text_status=restricted&groups_merge=ALL&satisfyall=ALL&order=-date%2Fcreators_name%2Ftitle&_action_search=Search Query 3: No full text available: http:// eprint.domai /cgi/search/quicksearch?screen=Public%3A%3AEPrintSearch&basic_merge=ALL&basic=web&full_text_status=none&groups_merge=ALL&satisfyall=ALL&order=-date%2Fcreators_name%2Ftitle&_action_search=Search It was intended to use the survey methodology across the Russell Group universities which host an institutional repository based on the ePrints software.
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However it was not possible to get valid results for most of the repositories and it was subsequently discovered that this is an optional feature for ePrints repositories. Rather than abandon this work I have decided to publish this post in order to encourage institutions which host an ePrints repository to implement this feature since I feel it would be beneficial to the repository community if we had a better picture of how institutions are using repositories to host full-text items. The table below gives the results of the two test cases (from Bath and Southampton) together with details of the total number of items in the other repositories.
If information on the numbers of full-text items becomes available I will update this post and annotate accordingly. [Note there was an error in the figures for the ECS repository. This has now been corrected in the table below.] Ref.
No. Institutional Repository Details Query 1: Total Nos. of Items Query 2: Total Nos. of Full text Items Query 3: Total Nos. of Metadata-Only items Percentage of Full-Text Items A Institution : University of Bath Repository used : Opus Repository Summary : Uses ePrints. 20,210 1,387 18,823 6.86% B Institution : ECS, University of Southampton Repository used : eprint Repository Summary : Uses ePrints. 974 15,532 861 8,439 113 7,093 11.6% 54.3% TOTAL 21,184 35,742 2,248 9,826 18,936 25,916 10.6% 27.4% The table below gives the results of the findings for what seems to be the main repository from Russell Group Universities.
Note that the results were gathered using the public advanced search interface where this was available. If information on the numbers of full-text items becomes available I will update this post and annotate accordingly.
Ref. No. Institutional Repository Details Query 1: Total Nos. of Items Query 2: Total Nos. of Full text Items Query 3: Total Nos. of Metadata-Only items Percentage of Full-Text Items 1 Institution : University of Birmingham Repository used : eprint Repository Summary : Three entries. Uses ePrints.
411 2 Institution : University of Bristol Summary : One entry. Uses DSpace 3 Institution : University of Cambridge Summary : Four entries. Uses DSpace. 4 Institution : Cardiff University Summary : 1 entry.
Uses ePrints. Repository used : ORCA 4,562 5 Institution : University of Edinburgh Summary : Three entries. Uses DSpace. 6 Institution : University of Glasgow Summary : Three entries.
Uses ePrints. Repository used : Enlighten 40,803 7 Institution : Imperial College Repository used : Spiral Summary : Type not known. Not determined 8 Institution : King’s College London Repository used : Department of Computer Science E-Repository Summary : One entry.
Uses ePrints. 999 9 Institution : University of Leeds Repository used : White Rose Research Online Summary : Uses ePrints. Shared by Leeds, Sheffield and York. 8,013 10 Institution : University of Liverpool Summary : One entry.
Repository used : Research Archive 698 641 57 93% 11 Institution : LSE Summary : 2 entries. Repository used : LSE Research Online 26,044 4,534 21,510 17.4% 12 Institution : University of Manchester Summary : One entry.
Repository used : MMS Not determined 13 Newcastle University Summary : One entry. Repository used : Newcastle Eprints Not determined
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