Univ. of Notre Dame: Institutional Digital Repository Phase I Final Report

Quoting the web site:

This is an abridged version of a final report describing the activities surrounding Phase I of a one-year pilot project called the University of Notre Dame Institutional Digital Repository. After outlining the goals and methods of the project, the report enumerates ways the project could be continued. The seventy-some people who participated in the project are now looking to administrators across the University to become familiar with the contents of the report and set its future course.

What problems is Notre Dame trying to solve?

The three-fold purpose of the Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) is closely aligned with the goals of the University. The IDR's three goals are:

1. to make it easier for students to learn
2. to make it easier for instructors to teach
3. to supplement the scholarly communications process

With these goals in mind the IDR is defined as a set of digital objects combined with sets of services applied against those objects - think "digital library".

The need to create institutional repositories was a series of hallway conversations at the iPRES conference. Given those conversation and the goal set out by Notre Dame, I suspect that this report-- both abridged and full versions available online -- will be well read.