Open Access Engagement: A Look Into the Repositories Hosted by the Texas Digital Library

Establishing, maintaining, and growing institutional digital repositories is yet another effort librarians make to ensure greater material access and availability. The Texas Digital Library (TDL) hosts such repositories for over 20 member institutions across the state and consistently seeks ways to encourage use of the associated materials. This capstone project was conducted in an effort to understand university-wide use and understanding of institutional repositories, which elucidates patterns of involvement with materials created by each institution’s surrounding community and associated ontologies of open access. Interviews were conducted with TDL’s member institutions to gain greater insight into how these tools are used across higher education, as well as to provide recommendations geared toward facilitating greater use and engagement with the materials housed within the repositories.