The eScholarship@BC Repository: An Overview


A Digital Institutional Repository for Boston College

In keeping with the University’s mission to, "[produce] nationally and internationally significant research that advances insight and understanding, thereby both enriching culture and addressing important societal needs," the eScholarship@BC Repository represents a central online system to manage submission, access, distribution and preservation of scholarly information. Only a fraction of the material created by the Boston College community (published items that are indexed, purchased and preserved by libraries) enjoy ready access by users and long-term attention to its enduring usability. Both published and unpublished research can deserve committed stewardship and the widest possible circulation. The digital eScholarship@BC "institutional repository" maintained by the Boston College Libraries can provide access, organization and preservation to BC’s valuable – but at present dispersed and ephemeral – scholarship.

What Does the eScholarship@BC Repository Save?

Scholarly work such as conference proceedings, unpublished articles, audiovisual presentations, and working papers generally receive limited or uncertain exposure. The eScholarship@BC Repository saves these and other items in a reliable centralized online archive. The repository can hold items in many digital formats, including text, images, data sets, and computer programs. The repository can include both unpublished and published material (such as journal articles and book chapters) and both the products and the raw materials of research (such as data and primary sources in digital form). The Repository also includes links to Boston College dissertations published by Proquest, accessible to Boston College affiliates and on the university campus, and available as 24-page previews for non-Boston College users.

Open Access and the eScholarship@BC Initiative

The Boston College Libraries promote and practice, wherever possible, open access to scholarly literature through their open access initiatives: the eScholarship@BC Repository and open-access electronic journal publication. The Libraries are a signatory of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which defines open access as the "free availability on the public internet" of scholarly literature "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." Open access benefits scholars by maximizing the visibility, influence, and benefit of their research. It helps redress global inequity of access to scholarship by dismantling cost barriers to research dissemination. And it returns research results more swiftly and readily to the public, who provide much of the funding for scholarly work.

Digital Commons Software

The eScholarship@BC Repository is powered by the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress)'s Digital Commons software, licensed by the Boston College Libraries from bepress. Digital Commons provides the infrastructure for the repository and also allows Boston College researchers to produce and manage online journals and peer-reviewed series quickly and inexpensively.

What Is an Institutional Repository?

An institutional repository is a digital collection of the creative intellectual output of the college or university community. Although the idea precedes the publication, the “institutional repository” concept garnered wide attention in 2002 with a report by Raym Crow for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an affiliate of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Crow defines institutional repositories as digital collections that capture and preserve the intellectual output of a university or community of universities. The idea for institutional repositories grew from the success of discipline-based e-print archives, such as CogPrints, Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), and the pioneering arXiv in physics, mathematics, and computer science.

A key feature of institutional repositories as commonly understood is the policy of open access. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (of which Boston College Libraries is a signatory) defines open access as the "free availability on the public internet" of scholarly literature "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."

A second crucial characteristic of institutional repositories is interoperability, or the capacity for multiple systems to exchange and use information. The Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-MHP) allows for the collection and use of metadata from disparate institutional repositories and other digital collections. Federated search services—powerful search engines that process data from separate archives as if they were a single archive—can be established using this protocol This unified searching may effectively yield an integrated virtual online archive comprising the digital collections of dispersed institutional and disciplinary archives worldwide. Efforts are also underway to improve Internet search engines’ ability to crawl institutional repositories; for example, Google is developing an advanced search option that will index repositories’ contents.

Dozens of institutional repositories operate worldwide today on a number of OAI-compliant software platforms, including open-source DSpace (a joint venture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hewlett-Packard unveiled in 2002) and EPrints (developed at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom), as well as software created by the Berkeley Electronic Press used by the California Digital Library eScholarship Repository.


More information about eScholarship at Boston College: