Institutional repository

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An Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating—in digital form—the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.

For a university, this would include materials such as research journal articles, before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it might also include other digital assets generated by normal academic life, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects.

Objectives

The four main objectives for having an institutional repository are:

  • to create global visibility for an institution's scholarly research;
  • to collect content in a single location;
  • to provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving it;
  • to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost ("grey") literature (e.g., theses or technical reports).

The origin of the notion of an "institutional repository" [IR] are twofold:

IRs are partly linked to the notion of digital interoperability, which is in turn linked to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and its Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The OAI in turn had its roots in the notion of a "Universal Preprint Service,"[1] since superseded by the open access movement.
IRs are partly linked to the notion of a digital library—i.e., collecting, housing, classifying, cataloguing, curating, preserving, and providing access to digital content, analogous with the library's conventional function of collecting, housing classifying, curating, preserving and providing access to analog content.

There is a mashup indicating the worldwide locations of open access digital repositories. This project is called Repository 66 and is based on data provided by Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and the OpenDOAR service (a directory and tool for worldwide open access repositories) developed by the SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access). As of 2007, data from this service indicates that the most popular IR software platforms are Eprints, DSpace, and Bepress (Digital Commons).

Examples of institutional repository softwares

DSpace

DSpace is an open source software package that provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly used as the basis for an institutional repository. It supports a wide variety of data, including books, theses, 3D digital scans of objects, photographs, film, video, research data sets and other forms of content. The data is arranged as community collections of items, which bundle bitstreams together.

DSpace is also intended as a platform for digital preservation activities. Since its release in 2002, as a product of the HP-MIT Alliance, it has been installed and is in production at over 240 institutions around the globe [2], from large universities to small higher education colleges, cultural organizations, and research centers. It is shared under a BSD licence, which enables users to customize or extend the software as needed.

History

The first version of DSpace was released in November 2002, following a joint effort by developers from MIT and HP Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In March 2004 the first DSpace User Group Meeting (DSUG) took place at Hotel@MIT, and it was there that the first discussions concerning the DSpace community and its future governance were discussed in earnest. The DSpace Federation formed a loose grouping of interested institutions, while the DSpace Committers group (see Community Development Model below) was formed shortly after, consisting of five developers from HP Labs, MIT, OCLC, University of Cambridge, and University of Edinburgh. Later two further developers from Australian National University and Texas A&M University also joined this group. DSpace 1.3 was released in 2005, and at around the same time the second DSpace User Group Meeting was held at the University of Cambridge. Following this, two further smaller user group meetings were spawned, the first in January/February 2006 in Sydney, and the second in April 2006 in Bergen, Norway. In March 2008, the DSpace Community released DSpace 1.5.

DSpace Foundation On July 17, 2007, HP and MIT jointly announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide leadership and support for the DSpace community.

Community Development Model

The DSpace community has attempted to base its formal structure along the same lines as the Apache Foundation community development model. That is, there is a user-base, within which is contained a subset of developers, some of whom are contributors to the core codebase. The developments by these contributors are then added to the distribution under the curation of a core team of committers, whose job is to ensure that the code meets the various guidelines laid out in the developer documentation, and that it contributes effectively to the direction of DSpace development (which should be/is decided by the community as a whole). The community is serviced technologically by a development base at SourceForge, and a number of mailing lists for technical queries and development discussion, as well as a general list for non-technical community members.

Membership of the community is implied by being interested and involved - there are no formal membership fees or lists.

Technology

DSpace is written in Java and JSP, using the Java Servlet API. It uses a relational database, and supports the use of PostgreSQL and Oracle. It makes its holdings available primarily via a web interface, but it also supports the OAI-PMH v2.0, and is capable of exporting METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) packages. Future versions are likely to see increasing use of web services, and changes to the user interface layer.

EPrints

EPrints is an open source software package for building open access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It shares many of the features commonly seen in Document Management systems, but is primarily used for institutional repositories and scientific journals. EPrints has been developed at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science and released under a GPL license.

The EPrints software is not to be confused with "eprints" (or "e-prints"), which are preprints (before peer review) and postprints (after peer review), of research journal articles: "eprints" = preprints + postprints.

History

EPrints was created in 2000 as a direct outcome of the 1999 Santa Fe meeting that launched what eventually became the OAI-PMH.

The EPrints software was enthusiastically received, became the first and one of the most widely used[2] free open access, institutional repository software, and it has since inspired many emulations.

Version 3 of the software was officially released on the 24th January 2007 at the Open Repositories 2007 Conference and was described by its developers as "a major leap forward in functionality, giving even more control and flexibility to repository managers, depositors, researchers and technical administrators." [3]

Technology

EPrints is a Web and command-line application based on the LAMP architecture (but is written in Perl rather than PHP). It has been successfully run under Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X [4]. A version for Microsoft Windows is being developed but will be released under a non-GPL license [5].

Version 3 of the software introduced a (Perl-based) plugin architecture for importing and exporting data, converting objects (for search engine indexing) and user interface widgets.

Configuring an EPrints repository involves modifying configuration files written in Perl or XML. Web based configuration tools are in development. The appearance of a repository is controlled by HTML templates, stylesheets and inline images. While Eprints is shipped with an English translation it has been translated to other languages through (redistributable) language-specific XML phrase files. Existing translations include Bulgarian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian. [6].

Digital Commons

Digital Commons is the world's leading hosted repository platform. This hosted service is licensed by the Berkeley Electronic Press. It is used by associations, consortia, universities and colleges to preserve and showcase their scholarly output.

History

Bepress first offered its institutional repository software in 2002 for the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.[3] Digital Commons was later introduced at the American Library Association annual conference in June 2004.[4] From 2004 to July 2007, Digital Commons was licensed exclusively by ProQuest Information and Learning. As of July 2007, the Berkeley Electronic Press has resumed licensing Digital Commons directly to customers. Today, the Bepress Institutional Repository platform powers over 50 schools (in addition to the University of California System) under the name Digital Commons.[5]

Features

Institutions can add their content to their repository through batch uploads, by linking to external sites, or via a submit form. Digital Commons allows for a variety of publication types and auto-converts Word, WordPerfect, and RTF documents to PDF. A unique web page is generated automatically for each article that includes title, author, abstract, and citation information. All pages maintain a persistent URL and meet web accessibility standards. Digital Commons supports data harvesting and feeding. Content is optimized for fast and accurate indexing by Google and Google Scholar and is OAI compliant. Digital Commons provides user notification tools. This includes RSS feeds and automatic email notification for reports of newly published content, Mailing list manager to announce new research, and the "Tell a colleague" email functionality. Digital Commons also provides individual readership statistics.

Institutions using Digital Commons

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ ROAR Software Version Listing. Retrieved 2006-11-02.
  3. ↑ eScholarship Repository Release, April 3, 2002
  4. ↑ ProQuest's Digital Commons@ Winning Broad Market Acceptance, November 12, 2004
  5. ↑ Digital Commons Users

References
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External links

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