The purpose of this study was to evaluate the content growth of institutional repositories (IR) in
South India and analyse the type-wise growth of items available in these IRs and also discuss the
traits and trends exposed by them.
With the help of Registry of Open Access Repositories and Directory of Open Access
Repositories (OpenDOAR), 39 repositories were located in south India. From these, Personal
websites, the IRs that are currently not working and the repositories used for journal archiving
were excluded. A total of 22 operational IRs at 21 institutions were identified for the study.
Within a 15 month period, the data were collected from the 22 IRs twice for monitoring content
growth.
The content of nearly all IRs have grown over the 15 month period, and the overall content
growth rate was 7.82 per cent. Journal articles were the important content type of IRs, while
thesis and conference papers were the next common. Moreover, item monographs exhibited the
highest growth rate. Other categories, conference proceedings, and conference papers also
exhibited a high growth rate. The present study revealed that Indian repositories were actively
engaged in data curation activities, depositing a wide variety of items in their respective IRs.
Overall, South Indian repositories exhibited a slow growth rate and tended to become inactive.
Most South Indian Universities had not constituted the IRs, which led to the dominance of
English language material in these IRs.
The study was conducted only in South Indian IRs.
This is the first study in India, attempting to determine the type-wise growth of items in IRs.
Emerald allows authors to deposit their AAM under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-
commercial International Licence 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0).