Management of Indian institutional repositories

Purpose The present study aims to investigate various issues concerning the management of institutional repositories (IRs) developed in India. Design/methodology/approach The survey method was used. The data collection tool was a web questionnaire, which was created with the help of software provided by surveymonkey.com. The questionnaire was e‐mailed to the entire population i.e. all IRs identified in India. Findings It was observed that 79 per cent of the institutions had used the DSpace IR software package. The respondents considered end‐user interface to be the top‐ranking IR‐system feature. It was found that all IRs supported text (HTML, Postscript, PDF, Spreadsheet etc) file formats. Half of the respondents marked bitstream copying as a long‐term preservation strategy. Almost all institutional repositories were OAI‐PMH compliant. Research limitations/implications Only Indian IRs were studied and the findings were compared with other studies. Originality/value This is the first detailed study focusing on the management aspects of IRs. The present study has identified the existence of 16 functional IRs, some of which were not registered in any of the directories such as ROAR or Open DOAR.