open repository hosting dspace as a saleable service uki dsug meeting, friday 24th november 2006
TRANSCRIPT
OPEN REPOSITORY
Hosting DSpace as a Saleable Service
UKI DSUG meeting, Friday 24th November 2006
Or taking a peek at what makes us tick
Open Repository is a service from BioMed Central to build, launch, host and maintain institutional repositories for organisations. Built upon the latest DSpace repository software the service has been designed to be flexible and cost-effective. BioMed Central's economy of scale makes it possible for organisations that could not otherwise afford to, or lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house to run their own repositories.
The pitch
The deal
•Repo built and customised by BMC
•Hosted on BMC servers and db
•Training and support from BMC
•Repos administered by customer
The results• Nov. 2004 - Project launched, Inserm sign up as first
customer (although they leave for policy reasons in December 2005!)
• October 2005 - Manchester Metropolitan University
• April 2006 - University of Zurich and Landspitali University Hospital, Iceland
•May 2006 - General Teaching Council of Northern Ireland and University of Wolverhampton
• August 2006 - Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM)
• Nov. 2006 - Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research and University of Chester
How we do it• Multiple apps sitting side by side on Tomcat
• Code deployed from a single code base with custom configs / jsps etc
• One db schema with additional repo ids on each table to create repo specific ‘views’ of the schema
• Windows servers and Oracle database
• Currently DSpace 1.3.2
The extra bits
• Customised ‘OR’ interface • Upload metadata from PubMed ID or DOI• Submission without bitstream• PDF conversion within submission form• OA Datafeeds from PubMed Central• Saved Searches• Nate Sarr’s Researcher Pages• Custom browse displays
Developing a hosted service
• BMC’s customer base traditionally biomedical
• OR’s customer base is NOT!
• And no one wants ‘out-of-the-box’
• There’s no such thing as a standard repository solution
• Everyone has individual requirements / needs
• Everyone has ideas…
• Most ideas are good, most are transferable, ALL are important to the customer
Keeping the customers happy
• All non-core features have to be ‘turnoffandonable’
• Admins want to be able to make most of the custom interface changes themselves (and so do we)
• Interfaces needs to be intuitive – some of our librarians may still wear horn rimmed spectacles
• The only classes they need to worry about should have students in
• If all else fails send them cakes
Which means…
• Interoperability
• Configurability
• Scalability
• Usability
• Stability
