Repositories - research from universities, online: What is a repository?

A repository is a free online collection of documents, often scholarly. There are several kinds:

• repositories maintained by a single university, for its own students' dissertations and theses, and/or its own staff's published research. This often includes versions of papers published in scholarly journals
• repositories maintained by museums
• repositories focussing on a particular kind of material, such as grey literature, from many sources
• general repositories, with very large and diverse collections

Please note:

When a journal article is included in a repository, it will often not be identical to the published version. It may be an earlier version, before final corrections were made for publication. The same may apply to some other kinds of material. So if citing an item from a depository in an assignment, please ensure you make clear which version you have consulted. The SIA librarians can help if necessary.

Much material in repositories is available in full, but sometimes you will only have access to a citation (a brief description) instead of the whole text.