Technologies

Every institutional repository requires suitable technology to operate effectively. This section begins with a description of the key features needed in repository software, including compliance with relevant standards. It finishes by listing the most popular software packages used in institutional repositories in 2007.

The purpose of an institutional repository is to acquire, host, and make available electronic copies of research outputs from a department, organisation, or discipline. ‘Ingest’ is the term most commonly used for the data input process; Jones et al. (2006) say that this is most likely to be web-based, but that it should also offer other options for retrospective loading of material from other systems. The ingest process should allow authorised users to create appropriate metadata; the metadata requirements should be flexible to cater for different material types and different institutional standards. A similar web-based process should support resource discovery (Jones et al. (2006) term this ‘egress’), and again there may be a need for alternatives to export data in bulk.

Compliance with the Open Archives Initiative (2004) is a key requirement. This is a technique that lets repository providers expose their metadata to harvesters, to make it more easily discoverable.

Authentication (verifying a user’s identity) and authorisation (associating users with specific rights) facilities are necessary to control who is allowed to do what in the system.

The administration features are important; these include the processes by which new user accounts are set up, and the processes for reviewing and approving submissions of new repository content.

Archiving and preservation are also important - one of the early advantages mentioned to promote institutional repositories was that they provided a way for organisations to centralise preservation of key research outputs, rather than leaving it up to individual researchers to manage it.

Technical Evaluations

Details on a technical evaluation of selected open access repository solutions carried out in 2006 is available on the Technical Evaluation section.

An international survey conducted by the Primary Research Group (2007) revealed that there is a range of repository software in use. DSpace was the most commonly used (37%), followed by Fedora (17%) and EPrints (13%). Nearly 28% of repositories in the sample used a type of repository software not identified on the survey form.