Enhancing the visibility of Maltese research

Abstract

Since the implementation of the University of Malta’s Institutional Repository, OAR@UoM in September 2014, there has been tremendous growth in terms of both the number of deposited material and usage. To date, the University of Malta Library managed to populate OAR@UoM with over 12 000 important research resources. Nearly half of the repository’s content (44%) is currently available in Open Access without any restrictions or limitations. Furthermore, all items on OAR@UoM are visible and discoverable online through indexing by Google and Google Scholar. To further enhance the visibility of local researchers as well as their works, OAR@UoM has been registered with several key Open Archives Initiative (OAI) service providers. An OAI service provider is a website platform established and maintained by a scientific institution or organisation which utilises the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) to collect metadata records of primary documents from OAI data providers, i.e. institutional repositories and digital archives. The harvested records are then used to build an organised fully searchable metadata database equipped with a search system, user interface and a wide array of value-added services.