Digital Repositories
At the last meeting, 9 December at the Horniman Museum, we discussed digital repositories in museums. This came about because we recently had a visit at the British Museum from a librarian at the National Museums of Scotland which has a repository. I also brought up the possibility of having a joint repository for the MLAG institutions. At the moment there are not many museum depositories for publications so to keep the discussion going I have posted links to three I know of including the NMS. I have also posted a link to arXiv the well established (since 1991) subject depository hosted by Cornell University which currently has Open access to 645,461 e-prints in the mathematical sciences. This could be seen as a possible model of large scale inter-institution collaboration.
National Museums of Scotland
http://repository.nms.ac.uk/
Naturalis, National Museum of Natural History, Netherlands
http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/
American Museum of Natural History
http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/
arXiv
http://arxiv.org/
These were all taken from OpenDOAR the Directory of Open Access Repositories, http://www.opendoar.org/ which lists all current open access repositories and is hosted by the University of Nottingham.
Please do let me know if anyone is interested in exploring some collaboration or partnerships with us around research repositories and/or supporting the commmunication of research outputs in other ways. We are more than happy to talk more about our experience if that is helpful.
Regards
Evelyn Simpson, Head of Information Services, National Museums Scotland
There is some interesting material on this topic, much of it online and free, at this address:
http://digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/repository.htm