IDEALS Repository : About IDEALS

The top five benefits of depositing to IDEALS are:

Increased Dissemination and Impact of Your Research:
IDEALS provides high visibility and increased access to your research. The descriptive information about your deposited works will be made available to Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/), and other services. Some studies have shown that research and scholarship openly available on the web have increased impact and higher citations than research and scholarship that is not. See http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html for a bibliography of studies on the impact of open access.
Persistence and Preservation:
IDEALS provides persistent, permanent URLs to your digital research. In addition, IDEALS makes a commitment to preserve your digital content. See more about this.
Full text searching:
IDEALS provides full text searching of your research in most cases.
Control:
When you deposit into IDEALS, you retain your copyright. Even if the work has already been published many publishers will allow you to deposit your work into institutional repositories.
Presentation and promotion of your individual and department's research:
Faculty and researchers have the ability to create a customizable page highlighting their research and interests. You can link directly to this page. Departments, schools, research centers, and other scholarly or research units can also create communities focused on the research output of your unit. Additionally you can create discrete collections within that community to highlight particular aspects of the work of your unit.

Questions? Want to begin depositing in IDEALS? Contact Sarah Shreeves, the IDEALS Coordinator, by email or at 217-244-3877 or 217-333-4648.

IDEALS Mission

The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS) is a set of collections and related services that together constitute the campus institutional repository. IDEALS aims to complement traditional scholarly publishing. The IDEALS service preserves and provides persistent and reliable access to the digital works of faculty, staff, and students to give them the greatest possible recognition. IDEALS centralizes the twin goals of access and preservation, as do other institutional repositories, to provide the maximal campus commitment toward achieving these ends.

IDEALS is a service offered through the University Library and CITES under sponsorship of the Office of the Provost.

Technology Platform

IDEALS is currently using DSpace, an open source digital repository developed jointly by the MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company. We fully participate in the DSpace open source community.

Further Reading

For more information about the place of IDEALS in scholarly communication on campus see the Issues in Scholarly Communication, a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian, for the UIUC community.

Also see the original white paper that initiated the development of IDEALS: Illinois Digital Scholarship: Preserving and Accessing the Digital Past, Present and Future.

For more information about institutional repositories, the following resources provide a good overview:

Erv Blythe and Vinod Chachra. (2005) The Value Proposition in Institutional Repositories. Educause Review 40(5). http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0559.pdf.

Clifford Lynch. (2003) Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age. ARL Bimonthly Report 226. http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml.

SPARC. (2002) The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper. http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html.

For more information about open access, see Peter Suber's Open Access Overview.

Contact Information

For general information, contact Sarah Shreeves, IDEALS Coordinator, via email at sshreeve@uiuc.edu or phone at 217-244-3877.

For technical information, email Tim Donohue, IDEALS Research Programmer, via email at tdonohue@uiuc.edu or phone at 217-333-4648.