Institutional Repositories (IRs) have been developed by many universities in Canada and the United States as a means to collect, manage and provide access to scholarship produced on campus. Many IRs group their content into communities, which often align with the academic and administrative units of the university. Universities, however, frequently endure academic restructuring as academic units are created, folded, merged and renamed, which raises a number of questions for IR managers. Does academic restructuring require a reorganization of the IR? How can continuity between the scholarship of a newly created department and its predecessors be illustrated? What is the value of the academic and administrative contexts of scholarship in an IR?

Iowa State University’s IR, Digital Repository @ Iowa State University, was launched in April 2012 and was immediately faced with the division of the Department of Art and Design into five separate departments and the merger of two education departments into a new School of Education. This poster communicates Digital Repository @ Iowa State University’s adaptation of archival principles and practice in organizing and describing its content. Through the use of elements from archival science, it was able to address the challenges posed by academic restructuring. Specifically, the repository drew from archival arrangement and the principle of provenance to devise its organizational system and utilized elements from ISAAR (CPF), the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families, to create descriptions for campus units represented in the repository.