A scientist whose research generates vast amounts of digital data may not recognize what the strings of numbers mean a few months down the road, and another researcher coming fresh to the material will have even more trouble understanding it. If the machine it is stored on becomes obsolete, the data -- which might have led to new discoveries -- will be lost forever. In contrast, making the data available to other scientists for their own research might save years of research and millions of dollars. So should digital data be stored on central institutional servers -- or even in national or international archives? How should archivists organize the data? Should researchers be allowed to keep all or part of their stored data secret? What kinds of new science -- and publishing -- might emerge as digital data continue to proliferate?

Librarians are called in to archive huge amounts of information, but cultural and financial barriers stand in the way

Clifford Lynch (Lynch, 2003) has defined and IR as follows:In my view, a univerty-based institutional repository is a set of services that university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.

The development of institutional repositories has typically involved administrative and technical staff from libraries and campuses, with little input from reference librarians and subject specialists. Reference librarians have vital roles to play in helping to recruit authors to submit their content to institutional repositories, as well as in educating users to search such repositories effectively and retrieve the scholarly content from them. The experience that reference librarians have in searching a wide array of databases also enables them to provide a useful perspective on the design of effective search interfaces for institutional repositories. Experience at the University of Oregon demonstrates the efficacy of involving reference librarians in the design and development of an institutional repository from the beginning.