Book Review: Institutional Repositories: Content and Culture in an Open Access Environment

As repository technology matures, the cultural and organizational aspects of setting up and running an institutional repository have come to the forefront of the discussion surrounding their deployment. The book deliberately does not discuss any software in particular but focuses more on identifying key stake holders in the changing information environment and their role in the institutional repository scenario with regard to strategic and policy issues. Key aspects such as advocacy, user engagement, content policy, preservation and curation are covered in a clear and practical fashion, drawing on the author’s experience of running an institutional repository. Although the book covers important and relevant issues, it is occasionally uneven in its depth and coverage, dealing with some aspects in great detail and only briefly mentioning others. A short introductory chapter creates the framework for the book by providing a definition of institutional repositories, followed by a very broad second chapter entitled The Changing Information Environment. In this chapter key stake holders are identified and described, followed by a general section describing the Open Access movement and finishing by describing certain online information tools such as Flickr and Wikipedia in quite some detail. Although it is clear that the intention is to place institutional repositories within the wider information content, it would have been interesting if the author had mentioned for example, Cyber infrastructure or eScience projects which are important frameworks for future digital networks and academic communication and publishing.