Understanding Repository Growth at the University of North Texas: A Case Study

TL;DR

This case study analyzes the growth and characteristics of the University of North Texas's digital library repository over a decade, providing insights into digital library infrastructure development and usage patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a dataset from UNT Libraries' archival system and demonstrates how analyzing repository data can yield valuable insights into digital library operations.

Findings

Repository content has grown significantly over ten years

Repository updates and modifications are frequent and systematic

Sharing repository data can inform digital library practices

Abstract

Over the past decade the University of North Texas Libraries (UNTL) has developed a sizable digital library infrastructure for use in carrying out its core mission to the students, faculty, staff and associated communities of the university. This repository of content offers countless research possibilities for end users across the Internet when it is discovered and used in research, scholarship, entertainment, and lifelong learning. The characteristics of the repository itself provide insight into the workings of a modern digital library infrastructure, how it was created, how often it is updated, or how often it is modified. In that vein, the authors created a dataset comprised of information extracted from the UNT Libraries' archival repository Coda and analyzed this dataset in order to demonstrate the value and insights that can be gained from sharing repository characteristics more broadly. This case study presents the findings from an analysis of this dataset.