Institutional repositories: the library’s new role

“Institutional repositories” is a new concept for collecting, managing, disseminating, and preserving scholarly works created in digital form by faculty and students in individual universities and colleges. It is born out of problems with the current scholarly communication model structured by commercial journal publishers and vendors. To properly implement these repositories, libraries will need to recruit librarians who possess digital collection management and Open Archive Information System (OAIS) management skills. In addition, training faculty and students to use OAIS, helping them prepare their digital products, involving them in institution‐wide policy making, and setting repository goals would be some of the new tasks that libraries will face.