Metadata documentation practices at ARL institutional repositories

This paper describes an investigation into whether institutional repositories at member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) provide publicly available metadata documentation via the repositories’ websites. The study compares the results of a September 2017 survey with findings from a review of ARL institutional repository websites. Slightly more than half of ARL institutional repositories do provide metadata documentation. Implications of the results are discussed, including specific research questions for moving forward. A call to reimagine documentation as a tool of transparency is delivered.