Building partnerships among social science researchers, institution-based repositories and domain specific data archives

The digital library world has recently developed and debated both the concept and the implementation of institutional digital repositories. It has spent less time discussing disciplineor domain-specific digital repositories. Such repositories have been in existence for many years in the social sciences and have generated important lessons about the long-term preservation and sharing of academic work. The goal of this paper is to compare these two kinds of repositories and to suggest ways that they can help build partnerships among themselves and with the research community. All the parties share important goals and, by working together, can advance these goals.