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The University of Michigan's Institutional Repository, Deep Blue, was listed as the eleventh largest repository of university content by the Registry of Open Access Repositories, an organization that tracks open access archives worldwide. No other U.S. based repository was listed higher in this category. This is especially significant given that Deep Blue has only been online for a little over a year.
With over 35,000 titles Deep Blue is one of the fastest-growing and most robust online institutional archives anywhere. Deep Blue's mission is to preserve and make easily accessible online the work of U-M faculty, which in many cases is difficult to find, out of print, or only available through expensive subscriptions to journals or other databases. Jim Ottaviani, Deep Blue's Coordinator, prefers not to overplay the ranking's importance as the sole indicator of Deep Blue's impact, focusing instead on the quality of its service: "We've had hundreds of active users and over a million downloads in our first year, so we're pleased Deep Blue has such strong campus support. We're excited that we are able to attract very high quality work and enable the greatest possible access to U-M research."
In the larger category of digital collections, the University of Michigan Library's online collections ranked fourth. Above the U-M on the list are the renowned collections PubMed Central and arXiv, covering biomedical and physics literature, respectively. PubMed is run by the federal government, and arXiv has had broad disciplinary support for more than fifteen years, so it is especially significant that a university library ranks favorably alongside them.
U-M Library online collections are managed by the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) and the Scholarly Publishing Office; examples of materials they make available include the books in the Making of America collection and contemporary journals such as Philosopher's Imprint. While PubMed and arXiv cater to highly specialized fields, U-M collections exhibit incredible breadth, ranging from the humanities to the sciences.
The U-M Library's numbers in this ranking do not include the hundreds of thousands of items that have already been digitized as part of the ongoing MBooks project, the U-M Library's partnership with Google to digitize its entire print collection. When the MBooks titles that are currently digitized are included in future rankings, the U-M Library could move up one or perhaps two spots.
As Associate University Librarian John Wilkin argues, rankings such as these provide evidence of the significant impact that the U-M Library has made in contributing to and shaping scholarly content on the Internet: "Over the years, we have worked to open our collections to the world and to create significant public goods. These rankings demonstrate the way that a university library can shape the nature of online research and access to scholarship."
