A Lightweight institutional repository

Institutional Repositories can be major efforts, their goal being to preserve and share the intellectual contributions of the members of an insitution. This may include not merely copies of journal articles, but be fully searchable repositories of journal articles, tech notes, maps, data sets, videos, recordings, and on through all the sorts of material which might be developed at an insitution. Two examples are at Tufts University [2008], and the NOAA Aquaculture Program [2008]. Our concern in the Marine Modeling and Analysis Branch is much more modest. Namely, we wanted to have a better system for our list of branch contributions, all of which are papers of one sort or another, and for our concern content searching is not necessary. Hence I developed a lightweight insitutional repository. It is capable of accepting publication information, a copy of the document, and automatically loads this to an appropriate location on the branch’s web server. It also updates the running listing of branch contributions (at 266 when this effort started), and displays the bibliographic information as entered. There are features still lacking, a better treatment of the author list, for instance. But as this is a lightweight effort, this is not a major problem. At some later date, a heavy duty institutional repository will be brought in to place in NOAA [Campbell, 2008, personal communication], and the information from this lightweight repository can be handed off to the more capable system.