The UT Digital Repository received some welcome recognition recently when it was ranked #50 in the Ranking Web of World Repositories’ list of the top 400 institutional repositories worldwide. We are excited to see that the repository, which is less than two years old, is already among the best.
The Ranking Web of World Repositories is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group that is part of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. The group creates the rankings, which reflect the impact of online scholarship, with the intention of supporting Open Access to research. The rankings are based on metrics such as the size and visibility (i.e. the number of external links received) of each repository.
The UT Digital Repository launched in September of 2008. It holds collections of electronic theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, works of faculty scholarship, and documents related to community engagement and service, as well as other special collections. Librarians at UT are now working with university researchers to systematically add more content to the repository, with the goal of giving faculty members a way to disseminate copies of their research results and scholarship on the Web through a managed, archival repository.
Mark McFarland is the University of Texas Libraries Associate Director for Digital Initiatives, and Co-Director of the Texas Digital Library.