Ural Federal University: University Electronic Archive Rises in Global Rankings
The Ural Federal University’s Electronic Research Archive has moved up in the prestigious global ranking of institutional repositories according to Webometrics (Transparent Ranking: Institutional Repositories by Google Scholar). Having risen by two positions, the Ural Federal University’s archive ranks 24th in the world and continues to hold first place in Russia.
“This year the Ural Federal University’s Electronic Research Archive celebrates its 20th anniversary, which is a very respectable age for an information resource. Scientific works as the basis of the content, diluted a little with materials on the history of the university and relevant academic materials, allow us to maintain a high level of quality of the repository. In June, we crossed the 100,000-document mark and entered the top 25 best open archives in the world,” said Elena Okhezina, Head of the Information and Analytical Support Division at UrFU.
The history of the Ural Federal University Electronic Research Archive began in 2002 with the creation of an electronic collection of abstracts and dissertations.
“At that time, there were no open repositories in Russia yet, the software for them was just beginning to be actively created and developed. At this stage, a lot depended on proper planning. The methodological and technological foundation was established at the very beginning, in many ways the successful development was based on the fact that the right goals were chosen from the beginning, and the right tasks were created to achieve them,” says Elena Okhezina.
The University as a publisher has produced an enormous amount of material throughout its history – publication activity, both scholarly and social, can be followed in the archive since 1920. The preservation and availability of materials “on paper” has played an important role in the speed and quality of the repository’s filling. Here a great contribution was made by the museum of the university, due to which collections of newspapers such as “Stalinets”, “Studen Worker”, “Ural University”, and “For Industrial Staff” were preserved and then digitized.
“At the moment, we are not experiencing any critical problems with computing resources – thanks to our Directorate of Information Technologies. When we have technical issues, we always find the necessary solution through constructive dialogue. All this work ultimately leads to the fact that the Archive is in demand, it is very popular and its position is only getting stronger every year, both in Russia and on a global scale,” sums up Elena Okhezina.