The process of information transfer used to be very lengthy and time taking process. It was earlier very difficult to access the required information from the information generation centres or the traditional libraries. The main reasons behind this are the access restrictions and other barriers existing between the libraries and the users. However, Information and Communication technology changed the scenario by breaking the access barriers and laid the path for digital revolution where the information storage, transfer and retrieval are made very easy for information transfer. Recall time for information retrieval in digital systems has come down as compared to the traditional libraries. To serve the societal goals, institutions have to accommodate current technologies to overcome the knowledge gap in the society by creating, collecting, storing, processing and distributing of the information.

The digital content produced nowadays is enormous and thereby the role of libraries in providing information has become crucial. Higher educational institutions generate a quantum of digital academic and scholarly content. The crossover from print to electronic databases in the libraries is playing prominent role to collect, archive, maintain and publish the content. Once the resources increased in the traditional library system the retrieval rate also increased. Then dawn the concept of digitization and digital library. The concept of digital library is defined in many ways. In general, digital libraries are same as traditional library system, except that the material is represented in the digital format.

Traditional libraries gather, compile, catalogue, preserve, and provide access to the research intellect. Institutional repositories (IR) accomplish the same task with the potential incentive of increased accessibility and collaborative efforts, which are created by building a justifiable program. Institutional repositories are a fairly modern innovation among top tier academic institutions and major science and technological institutes, providing open access to the research outputs of teaching, non —teaching and research faculty.

An Institutional Repository (IR) is a digital archive where an institution's intellectual work is made accessible and preserved for posterity. IR will have influence over the full cycle of scholarly communication on campus, from research through publication, collection, and preservation. Libraries play this important role in shaping institutional digital repositories.

According to Clifford Lynch “institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution. (Lynch, 2003)

In the early 1990s the big push started when most of the academic disciplines started contributing their scholarly work through Open Access publishing. Institutional Repositories have been progressively recognized as an important tool for scholarly communication, source of institutional visibility and a possible source of institutional knowledge organisation. Here the major difference between the traditional and existing institutional repositories is that authors are potentially the major stake holders. Acceptance of the target audience and sufficient funding for the long-term visibility makes the Institutional repository (IR) a success.

Institutional Repository is an essential component in any higher education and research institution in the present networked society due to the factors like, technological changes; significant increase in the overall volume of research; increasing need of archival and access to unpublished information; increasing demand to access knowledge objects from anywhere at anytime; and increasing uncertainty over who will handle the preservation and archiving of scholarly research materials.

The importance of the standard IR project are summarized by Kamila (2009) as follows:

The benefits of IRs for the scientist/academician and the research institution are summarized by Kamila (2009) as follows.

The scholarly material produced by the organization is available in one place, reflecting the intellectual achievements of the institution, and serving as a valuable marketing tool. Documents reflecting the institutional history, both scholarly and non- scholarly, are preserved for future use, much like a traditional archive preserves paper material. Material that is not traditionally published is included in the repository, including drafts of unpublished articles or book chapters, unpublished research, student works, learning objects, and creative works (Kamila, 2009).

Among the higher education system in India, specifically with respect to technical education, Indian Institutes of Technologies (IIT)s are premium institutes that stand the best in India. The ultimate goal of these premium institutes is to produce a core of knowledgeable professionals from multidisciplinary areas. Par to the standards and the excellence which they have, they are lacking behind to share the knowledge which is been generated in these institutes in the form of research articles, research finding which were presented in reports, conference and symposia, pioneering lectures and teaching materials. These materials are means of referring to further research findings and learning. Institutional repositories (IRs) play the role to archive, curate and disseminate the knowledge in open access domain. The intellectual knowledge sharing through the interoperable repositories enhances the academic status and quality of an institution. Table 1 indicates the availability of IRs in various IITs. Table 2 gives indicates the information sources included in the IRs of various IITs.

Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) initially used to have an IR making its presence only on intranet. The retrospective IR used to archive all the thesis and dissertations of MSc, M.Tech and PhD courses. The genesis of Research Archives of Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (RAIITH) took place in the year 2014. Eprints was initially installed on a personal computer desktop to test the features by uploading very few records, then could manage to do at most research on the test bed by increasing the addition of records to the database in the form of multiple type of documents (viz., Article, Book chapter, conference proceeding, Thesis, Patent, monograph etc.,) Also this gave a scope to add few more plug ins to the existing software for better output. Then the database mirrored on to an individual blade server with sufficient hardware requirements. Eprints 3.2 was installed on the test bed and then could later update to the versions3.3.12 and 3.3.15

Integration of data elements in Eprints is quite a good model where the drawings and text images can be combined and updated. The integration part of information and updating of the research content at various stages in Eprints at the author drafting stage and publication process is easy. ROAR statistics says that there are 611 institutional repositories (ERs) installed worldwide, using Eprints software of various available versions. In India there are 109 repositories hosted using different open source software. Almost all the CSIR laboratories setup their in-house IRs using Eprints and DSpace software.

RAIITH was initially established with 554 records of institute's research output in the form of thesis (viz. M.Sc., M.Tech, Ph.D.). The pdf format of these records have been gathered and could successfully add to the newly installed eprints IR from the retrospective in-house repository. Later the content of the IR slowly increased its pace by collecting all the research publication from the major bibliographic database via Scopus. From the year 2015 onwards IIT Hyderabad Library team started collecting the research publications from another pioneered bibliographic database, Web of Science (WoS). RAIITH holds preprints, post- prints, open access articles, conference papers, monographs, book chapters, IITH news articles and patents. Most of them cover the major research areas involved at Indian Institute of Technology and a small number of them cover a wider subject base. Figure 1, a screenshot, indicates the document types and figure 2 indicate the divisions included in RAIITH.

Table 3 depicts the resource type and number of the resources in RAIITH.

Table 4 depicts the deposits to RAIITH and Table 5 depicts the average of deposits for 4 consecutive years 2014 -2017.

RAIITH allow free access to abstracts without any necessary registration. For the full text article from the repository, a request is to be made by clicking the link ‘Request a copy’ that shall send a mail to the RAIITH admin as-well-as to the first author or the concerned supervisor of the article or thesis. RAIITH follow the embargo period of 3 years for MTech thesis and 5 years for Ph.D. thesis from the date of submission in library. The pre/post prints of the research articles, conference papers and other research findings collected from the students/researchers are archived in RAIITH. Presently, RAIITH provides access credentials only to the faculty of IITH enabling them to self-archive their content without the intervention of library staff. Repository admin review the uploads to get the research indexed and harvested by the major harvester like BASE, Google scholar, OAISTER etc

Content of RAIITH is based on Sherpa/RoMEO for archival of information. Altmetrics, the new metrics for analysing and informing scholarship based on the social web, focus on web influence and refers to a range of measures of research impact that go beyond citations. It measure the number of times a research output gets cited, tweeted, liked, shared, viewed or discussed. It harvests open access journals, citation databases which index scholarly articles, web- based research sharing services, and social media. One such analysis on RAIITH is given as Fig 3 and 4.

Currently RAIITH holds 3,418 records having 30,538 download with 47% (1606 documents) full text and 22% (752 documents) open access. The repository became popular and could reach to the maximum globally, the IR registered its presence with most popular harvesting search engines like BASE, Google scholar and OAISTER. Table 6 gives download count and Table 7 gives average downloads of RAIITH.

The repository is searchable by a Basic search interface and also an advanced search. For a quick reach, the users can easily get connected to the repository by browsing by author, year, subject and type of information. The recently added content to the repository can be viewed under Latest Additions.

Building open scholarly repositories, institutional repositories, digital libraries, etc are necessary for the visibility of research carried out by an institution. IRs enhance the idea of rebuilding trust between the library and the users. IRs make the libraries to feel that it act as a vehicle to carry forward research with visibility and openness of the work, offering more citations. IRs also act as a platform for collaborative research among internationally distributed IRs.

References