The UP Visayas Institutional Repository Working Group, composed of UP Visayas University Library (Proponent) and UPV Data and Information Services Program (DISP) (Co-Proponent), initiated a project known as the Digital Institutional Repository (IR) for the University of the Philippines Visayas.
An Institutional Repository (IR) is a digital service that an academic institution can offer to the members of its community and provides an online warehouse that is designed to archive, manage, organize, preserve, and showcase the intellectual output of students, faculty, and staff to a broader audience. It also aims to make them more accessible, searchable and retrievable online. With the repository, UPV publications, theses, and reports will be indexed and searchable in Google and Google Scholar.
The creation of an IR service will bring several benefits to the UPV community, including providing open access and scholarly communication in the digital age. An IR will enable UPV faculty and students to promote their research and scholarship to a broader audience via a single digital portal. It also offers increased support for UPV faculty scholarship and develops plans to manage and make freely available the published results and digital data resulting from funded research.
Another benefit is the focus on student research and accomplishments. An IR offers a centralized, institutional mechanism for highlighting the excellent work of UPV students and their learning outcomes – a very important service in the transformed curriculum that places a strong emphasis on deep learning and intensive faculty-student collaborative scholarly and creative activity. An IR will also be a great recruitment tool. Furthermore, archiving and providing permanent access to student-produced digital materials will help UPV graduates feel that they are an ongoing part of the university and will create stronger ties between alumni and their alma mater.
Institutional identity, advancement, and public accountability are additional benefits. An IR helps to advance the institutional goals and mission of the university by highlighting UPV’s “excellence in teaching, creativity, scholarship, and citizenship,” as affirmed in its mission statement. By exposing a wider public to the university’s intellectual output, the digital repository will promote an institutional brand and contribute to UPV’s overall reputation and prestige and facilitate the visibility of its unique institutional history throughout the UPV community and beyond.
The development of an IR is aligned with the Library’s mission: “To provide information resources and services that enhance knowledge and uphold the functions of UPV as a world-class university forefront of education and research development.”
The approved amount for this project, including training, is 772,628.93 Php. The training will be conducted by the technical experts from SEAFDEC-AQD. (With reports from the UPV Institutional Repository Working Group)
