The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) of the US Department of Commerce and Information International Associates, Inc. (IIa) recently formed a Joint Venture (JV) to develop an Institutional Repository (IR) Service for federal agencies. Institutional Repositories are collections of agency scientific and technical information documents and other content that represent the work and mission of the agency, provided as a searchable, digital collection. The IR will be hosted by NTIS and promoted and supported by expert content managers and a technical team from IIa and NTIS. As part of this new NTIS line of business, the IR will provide a framework through which federal agency content can be made available, providing users with increased ease of access and agencies with cost savings.
Individual IRs will be developed for agencies based on a core set of services with optional services, including those based on Web 2.0 technologies. This IR Service is projected to be a valuable asset for smaller agencies; agency components; projects and programmes that need to provide information collection and dissemination but do not have sufficient IT and content management support; for agencies who are interested in support for retooling their current repositories; and for agencies seeking to take advantage of new technologies such as mash-ups, blogs, and wikis which they can reuse and repurpose from other resources through the IR. Agencies will be able to respond to growing Administration Open Government requirements for transparency and citizen involvement. One major benefit will be that cost savings will occur as the technology and development of the system is shared – not redeveloped in multiple settings.
Among the core services to be provided will be content inventories, selection, and harvesting; the ability to map agency information to a core metadata scheme based on the standards to be used by and on the needs of the agency; customized interface design; increased search capabilities; and disaster recovery, archiving and preservation. Optional services may include extension of the core metadata scheme to meet the specific needs of the agency audience, customised controlled vocabularies and taxonomies, metadata creation and controlled vocabulary indexing, quality assurance capabilities, and value-added subject matter expertise.
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