This study, funded by KERIS (The Korean Education and Research InformationService) aims at building an evaluation model for diagnosing and solving problems of the "dCollection" consortium, composed of institutional repositories at more than 40 universities. The evaluation model, as tools not only for a member library's self-evaluation of its own system but also for assessment of the dCollection systems as a whole, is set up in two steps: First, based upon literature review from digital library evaluation and institutional repositories, and case studies on university repositories, the conceptual framework was composed of four categories: content; system and network; uses, users and submitters; and management and policy. And, second, the evaluation framework was modified through three methods, such as a Delphi method, an expert forum and a simulation test, leading to the evaluation model with 4 categories and 34 indicators.
IntroductionAccess to academic journals has become more difficult as the prices of academic journals have increased rapidly. Furthermore, the advent of Web-based journals has changed the way institutions subscribe to journals, from choosing individual publications to contracting with publishing companies. These changes have led to a decrease in materials at libraries, resulting in two problems: it becomes more difficult to obtain information, and more difficult to circulate it. Under these circumstances the open access movement started. The movement aims to provide researchers with more access to resources, and authors with wider dissemination of their works, resulting in greater research impact. To realize open access as an alternative to the existing scholarly communications, distributing journals through institutional repositories was proposed.Motivated by the open access movement, academic institutions are building institutional repositories (IRs) for a nationwide knowledge distribution infrastructure. KERIS, the governmental agency which provides various support for university information systems, proposed to organize institutional repositories into a consortium, called "dCollection (Digital Collection)," composed of more than 40 universities since 2003, to give users more access to resources, and to give authors more readers. For this consortium, KERIS also built the repository software platform called "dCollection system," in cooperation with member universities, to freely distribute the platform to the member universities. For the federated searches, KERIS's Research Information Service System, called "RISS," harvests metadata from the dCollection systems operated by the member libraries.The dCollection Promotion Project, funded by KERIS, aims at building an IR evaluation model. In this model the procedural assessment is more emphasized than the actual performance, in order to pinpoint procedural weakness of institutional repositories of each member library and to find their customized solutions, where procedural assessment evaluates current operating and financial processes, while perf...