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1. Introduction
Institutional repositories are digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community ([1] Crow, 2002).
Institutional repositories are essential technologies for capturing structural intellectual capital, knowledge sharing and management in academic and research institutions, especially in developing countries like India. Institutional repositories may include pre-prints, technical reports, working papers, thesis and dissertations, conference proceedings, teaching materials etc ... the intellectual capital of the academic institution.
Open access digital repositories are still in nascent stages of development in India. The Directory of Open Access Repositories (Open DOAR) (www.opendoar.org/) lists only 27 digital repositories available for access in India as compared to 291 in the USA.
Academic institutes in a developing country like India, have constraints on infrastructure, manpower and funding. Thus identifying the resource requirements to establish an institutional knowledge repository keeping in view these constraints is necessary.
This paper presents a simulation done at a business school in India to determine the amount of data that could be supported and the number of simultaneous users who can search and view/access the contents of an institutional repository with a minimal server configuration.
2. Birth of the institutional knowledge repository
2.1 Need to capture the intellectual capital of a business school
The growing demand for professional managers resulted in the mushrooming of management education institutions across the Indian sub-continent. To evaluate the quality of education in these institutions various Business School Surveys are being conducted that rank these business schools in India.
These surveys depend on questionnaires filled up by the business schools. Most questionnaires taken into consideration parameters like brand value, learning ambience, intellectual capital and growth ([3] Doctor and Ramachandran, 2007a; [5] Doctor and Ramachandran, 2008a).
All the surveys give weightage and importance to the intellectual capital of the business school. A business school's intellectual capital is the sum of its human capital (talent- skills and knowledge of the people- faculty and students), structural capital (intellectual property - the published scholarly material of its faculty, methodologies, software, documents - technical reports, question banks and other knowledge objects) and customer capital (client relationships- students, corporate) ([8] Stewart, 2001). Thus, the capture and preservation of the published scholarly material of its faculty, the structural intellectual capital of a business...