Partnerships at Swinburne

The role academic libraries perform for the corporate side of their institutions is usually much less public than those provided to their most visible user groups: students and academics. This is starting to change. Swinburne Library is one of many Australian academic libraries managing an institutional repository---a digital collection of the university's research publications designed to maximise their potential to be discovered online. Institutional repositories can achieve many admirable goals for librarians---they preserve digital assets into the future, address the problem of skyrocketing journal prices, facilitate open access to scholarly research, and provide a single point of entry to an institution's entire body of research. For universities, though, the benefit of institutional repositories is more concrete. Information about a university's research achievements made available online helps to attract student enrolments and funding for more research.