Hi Hamidreza,

I am guessing that you are better qualified to answer technical aspects that may relate to this question. I think there is a difference of intention. A repository aims to publish material that originates from a single organisation, typically a university. I think another distinction is that a repository should adhere to principles of Open Access.

Motivation may provide another distinction. A repository aims to accrue to an organisation benefits form the research they support and fund. It maybe providing access to students to material published by staff and researchers. The benefits of creating that information may extend to marketing - this is our research. Internal management of research - answers the question what research has been published, by whom and where. For individuals it allows them a, hopefully well managed resource to put their research out to a wider community. It also provides metrics that are useful for researchers.

Underpinning repositories is a whole infrastructure, e.g. OpenDOAR, that harvests aims to provide access to repositories, measure content and use.

Hello Hamidreza,

As I understand it, the distinction is, that a repository (an insitutional or a subject repository) has the task to store the fulltexts, whereas in a digital library the metadata to that publications is presented, but the fulltext are not stored there. In some digital libraries you find not only metadata from repositories, but also metadata for other digital content as websites, blogs etc.

A repository and a digital library are 2 different things. A repository makes the intellectual output of an organisation (or multiple organisations or just one department) freely and openly available. A digital library on the other hand, is a gateway to electronic resources including but not limited to: an OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue), ebooks, ejournals (usually subscription based), bibliographic databases (e.g. CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science - depending on your subject areas) and citation management tools. It should also include access to online referencing and to a live librarian (real qualified person is good). I manage both a digital library and a repository so if you need more info, please contact me. It might be wise to start with a needs analysis of your clients.

I strongly agree with Aoife Lawton answer.Digital Library and Institutional Repository are two different things.

A also agree with Aoife - digital libraries are organized (conceptually, ...) gateways to digital resources. Conceptual organizations include standards but also thesauri, ontologies and other sorts of organized terminologies. Repositories are the digital resources that contain the "intellectual output" of people or organizations - and which could be organized (classified, described, indexed, ...) from different viewpoints. However, ther is a difference between a (simple) repository of resources and a corpus of resources. A corpus is a selection of (digital) resources undertaken with respect to a specific (research, professional or any other) objective. In French language you distinguish between "fonds" (repository) and corpus.

Agree with Kirstens and Aoifes views. A digital library provides access and meta data. It also maintains cross-references between papers.

I started a proceedings site CEUR-WS.org that would then qualify as a repository. The DL services are in that case provided by DBLP, a a popular index of computer science publications that itself has become the starting point for services of other institutions, such as sophisticated search engines based on the DBLP database.

A digital library offers access and information retrieval from its collections. A repository offers storage to collections, not access, nor information retrieval from individuals, unless dissemination of such collections are established by the owner of the information and the repository person in charge (or a hired company). An article (Practical guidelines for starting an institutional repository using DSpace software) that may be of some help can be accessed at: http://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/79321

An Institutional Repository depends on how a manager sets it up - yes it offers storage for collections, but can also offer complete Open Access. In the case of my own institution, we use D-Space in which we create different communities depending on the school, department, faculty, et al. and we prefer the institutional respository to be OA, but should there be sensitive papers for whatever reason, it could be closed access. See http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/community-list. We deposit a digital copy of research articles for archival purposes, but even more important, in doing so we provide OA on a global level, which raises the research profile of the researcher. Before, depositing any published publication into an Institutional Repository, check copyright on http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Basically digital library means all kind of library resources are availale in digital format and institutional repository means 

Digital library is the organisation that provides resources and services in digital format to its users. While institutional repositories are a kind of institutional intellectual productivity of the research scholars within an organisation that are collected, organised and accessed via computer network.Examples are dissertation, theses, journals published by the intellectuals, past examination questions, symposium, workshop, speech, etc.   

Institutional Repository includes the documents published or unpublished by institution, faculty, research scholars, students of an institution. On the other hand Digital library includes any document without any restriction of institute, place, country etc

Thanks for your answers

Broadly speaking digital library and Institutional repository are one and the same think. Documents generated in home institution in an OPEN ACCESS MODE by the faculty are only hosted in institutional repository rather than others using repository software (DSpace and e-print, Invenio) whereas digital library may host all other documents that are not confine to home institutions alone.

Open and full text access to digital content and long-term preservation and access are most important characteristics of institution repository.

Digital library covers all kind of library resources which can be accessed in digital format. However, Institutional repository covers whatever recorded data or information produced by the institution, i.e Data sets, pictures, videos, books, seminars, reports, ....etc.

Hello to all. Thank you for rising this question dear H.M. Aski. They completely different. In a fact let's compare the ProQuest EBL three layered Digital Library (User interface, Customer Library administrative and Vendor Back Administrative including CRM), or Turcademy and DsPace or Epritns (all in one specifically Administrative, Metadata and User). Or we can consider hybrid library as well as a big platform of Discovery (EDS, Summon, WMS DT), LIS (MARC21, EDIFACT, SIP and so on standards and protocols), Databases (EBSCO, JSTOR) and including Digital Repositories (DsPace). May conclude that DR is very specific and important chain of whole big Digital and Electronic Library (based on analog technologies) platform (in technical, economic and legal circumstances).

Digital library involves all kinds of non- print materials and resources provided in a digital format and is very global while institutional repositories are University database that provide details and full-text of University research outputs and electronic theses, which includes: i) full-text publications by University staff (journal articles, conference papers, book chapters etc.) and

ii) full-text electronic theses deposited by research degree postgraduates