MINDS @ UW: Innkeeper at the Roach Motel
A slightly depressing look at the state of Institutional Repositories from the Library perspective – however, contains some interesting points, and can’t help pointing at it for the quote:
“Likewise, Imperial College London’s effort to embed the repository in existing campus practice
and technology (Afshari and Jones 2007) is exemplary.”
One of the issues raised by the article is the state of repository software, but I think it is a shame that it focusses solely on the Open Source offerings, without considering what the alternatives might be. Although they don’t get the coverage online of DSpace and e-Prints, there are many commercial products out there which can be used for an Insitutional Repository:
DigiTool
Equella
The Hive
Intralibrary
Symposia
Contentdm
These products are not necessarily targetted directly at IR – some are from a library digital collections background, and some e-learning repository background, but they support the relevant standards.
I’m not making an argument for commercial over Open Source here, but just wondering why the Open Source products in this particular area get all the attention?
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Because they’re what I knew. 🙂 If I were to write it over again, I’d say that anybody picking ContentDM or Digitool is certifiable. BePress Digital Commons is top of the hosted heap.
Thanks for the comment 🙂 At the time I’d recently issued a tender for a system capable if managing both research and teaching content – and I was impressed by the products coming out of the ‘learning object repository market – some of which have seen minor adoption for research repos as well in the UK – Intralibrary and Equella at least.
My comments were meant more generally – I didn’t mean to single you out but just it was your article that triggered the thought 🙂