Speaker
Description
This presentation will examine the critical role of Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Institutional Data Repositories (IDRs) as foundational knowledge infrastructures supporting data-intensive research across academic institutions. As data sharing mandates and standards from funding agencies, publishers, and disciplinary societies continue to evolve, understanding the role of institutional data services, in particular IRs and IDRs, as complex knowledge infrastructures become increasingly important. This has been thrown into sharp relief as the United States grapples with unprecedented loss and manipulation of government data and federally funded research repositories.
Based on a comprehensive longitudinal study spanning 2017-2023, we will share findings on the significant growth of institutional data sharing solutions among Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions. Our analysis reveals that by 2023, over 54% of ARL academic libraries maintain dedicated IDRs alongside traditional IRs, marking a milestone where more institutions now have dedicated data repositories than those without. Additionally, the number of datasets shared in institutionally managed solutions grew exponentially, with IDRs seeing a 199% increase from 2020 to 2023.
Beyond quantitative growth, our presentation will explore how these repositories function as complex adaptive systems that seamlessly integrate technical infrastructure with human expertise, institutional policy, and social practices. Through an "infrastructural inversion" lens, we demonstrate how IRs and IDRs provide unique advantages in meeting federal data sharing requirements while facilitating local-to-global data interoperability. We will demonstrate how research libraries function as an "installed base" that provides critical organizational sustainability, curation expertise, and integration with institutional systems.
Our research demonstrates how IRs and IDRs serve as critical connective tissue between researchers, institutions, and broader scholarly communities. These repositories provide not only technical infrastructure for data storage but also facilitate human-mediated curation, standardization, and interoperability that enables data to move from local contexts to global discovery and reuse. We will discuss how institutional repositories facilitate interoperability through persistent identifiers, standardized metadata, and integration with campus research systems, enabling local data to be discoverable and reusable globally.
Our presentation will analyze how institutional repositories are uniquely positioned to meet the requirements and expectations of funding agencies and publishers through their integration of technical systems with human expertise. Specifically, we will highlight how the "articulation work" performed by data stewards and curators—often invisible but essential labor—transforms repositories from mere storage platforms into true knowledge infrastructures capable of supporting the entire research data lifecycle.
Our findings suggest several key advantages that institutional repositories provide over generalist or disciplinary alternatives. First, their integration into the university context enables better authentication and validation of researcher identities, increasingly important for research integrity and compliance with security requirements like NPSM-33. Second, local administration facilitates integration with other campus systems, from library catalogs to grant management workflows, creating a more seamless experience for researchers and administrators alike. Third, the presence of local data curation expertise helps researchers navigate complex requirements around sensitive data, human subjects protections, and intellectual property considerations.
Despite the development of robust, free, self-upload generalist repositories over the past decade, interest in institutionally managed repositories continues to grow. Our presentation will explore this phenomenon and suggest that the human layers of repositories—the expertise, relationships, and institutional knowledge that facilitate effective data stewardship—may explain this continued investment. We will conclude by discussing opportunities for further development of institutional data infrastructure, including deeper integration with research information management systems and machine-actionable data management plans.
This presentation will be valuable for institutions developing or refining their data infrastructure strategies as federal mandates for research data sharing continue to evolve, offering both empirical evidence of current trends and a theoretical framework for understanding repositories as complex sociotechnical systems rather than merely technical solutions.
