Harmonization and interoperability of metadata schemes used at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) repositories: the IIBI-UNAM Repository

As a result of the Open Access (OA) movement, it is undeniable that all over the world there are many completed and ongoing projects of institutional repositories (IR) as a new alternative for scientific communication. IR facilitate access to research outputs, i.e. articles, books, book chapters, theses and dissertations, among other publications. The creation of IR has been widely promoted in Mexico and Latin America. The Institute of Research on Library Science and Information [Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliotecologicas y de la Informacion, IIBI], as one of the 59 research institutes of the National Autonomous University of Mexico [Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM] has developed an IR that manages a collection of more than 2000 LIS publications, all of them in OA. A metadata scheme based on Dublin Core has been developed for the registration of the diverse types of academic publications mentioned above. Harmonization with other metadata schemes has been taken care of in order to achieve interoperability with other repositories, such as TESIUNAM administered by the UNAM General Direction for Libraries [Direccion General de Bibliotecas], which includes more than 500,000 records for dissertations and theses submitted ato UNAM schools, out of which 300, 000 are in OA.IBII also partners with the UNAM Institutional Repository, which aims to achieve the integration, organization, dissemination, and promotion of the contents generated or preserved by UNAM. IBII also cooperates with the National Repository of Mexico, created by the National Council of Science and Technology, which currently aggregates the repositories of 90 universities and academic institutions, including more than 65,000 digital resources. The objective of this paper is to show the main characteristics of the metadata scheme developed by the IIBI for the registration of different types of academic publications, as well as their harmonization and interoperability with the metadata used in the National Repository of Mexico and in the UNAM Institutional Repository.