Best Practices, Sustainability, and the Current State of Institutional Repositories

Institutional repositories are an established infrastructure for the preservation of research and other work. Despite this established infrastructure, there is a wide variety of platforms, personnel, and practices throughout institutions. Because of this, institutional repository managers face considerable challenges in determining best practices, day to day operations, and planning for the future. In 2024, the University of Tennessee Knoxville Libraries was preparing for the migration of their institutional repository to a new platform. This migration brought up several questions around best practices and the sustainability of institutional repositories. How do institutional repositories handle data, visual media, and other types of content? Who manages the institutional repositories, and how much time is devoted to this important work? Which standards do institutional repository managers rely on to inform their decisions? A group of librarians involved in the migration created a survey in 2025 to ask peer institutions about their best practices, sustainability, and general management of institutional repositories. Survey questions included topics such as campus and librarian perception of institutional repositories, and what specific practices lead to success (or failure) for institutional repositories overall. This presentation will give an overview of the survey questions and the initial results. Topics to be covered include accessibility, migration, platform differences, institutional repository personnel, and the general future of institutional repositories in academic libraries. Those who attend this presentation will leave with a renewed understanding of the current landscape of institutional repositories in academic libraries. Attendees will be given a chance to share their own experiences from their institutions. We hope that this presentation will inspire further conversation and research in the ever-evolving environment of institutional repositories.