This is an age of Information explosion. Institutional Repository is a new concept for collecting, Managing, disseminating and preserving scholarly works created in digital form by faculty and students in individual universities and colleges in India. Most higher education and research institutions are funded by the central and state governments. These institutions have made a significant contribution to the transmission of knowledge and to research in all fields and disciplines. The libraries of those institutions also play a vital role in acquiring and disseminating information for academic and research activities. Digital libraries are a way of making educational and research data and information available to faculty, researchers, students, and others at the institutions and worldwide. In this electronic publishing age, academic institutions including universities have increasingly recognized that an institutional repository (IR) is an essential infrastructure of scholarly dissemination. An IR is a digital research archive consisting of accessible collections of scholarly work that represent the intellectual capital of an institution. This paper discusses about the Institutional repositories – contents, benefits, and challenges of the major Institutional repository projects in Karnataka. 

Keywords: Digital Library; developing countries; Institutional repository; Open source software; Open Archive Initiatives.