  This article presents a study of the current state of Universities
Institutional Repositories (UIRs) in Canada. UIRs are vital to sharing
information and documents, mainly Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETDs),
and theoretically allow anyone, anywhere, to access the documents contained
within the repository. Despite calls for consistent and shareable metadata in
these repositories, our literature review shows inconsistencies in UIRs,
including incorrect use of metadata fields and the omission of crucial
information, rendering the systematic analysis of UIR complex. Nonetheless, we
collected the data of 57 Canadian UIRs with the aim of analyzing Canadian data
and to assess the quality of its UIRs. This was surprisingly difficult due to
the lack of information about the UIRs, and we attempt to ease future
collection efforts by organizing vital information which are difficult to find,
starting from addresses of UIRs. We furthermore present and analyze the main
characteristics of the UIRs we managed to collect, using this dataset to create
recommendations for future practitioners.
