Rethinking the Digital Media Library for RIT\u27s The Wallace Center

In 2012, the Digital Preservation Team at Rochester Institute of Technology\u27s The Wallace Center undertook an assessment of its Institutional Repository, the Digital Media Library. The Digital Preservation Team looked at the repository\u27s current performance and requirements for ensuring its future success, and then examined four different philosophical approaches to configuring an IR that are in use by research institutions today: All-in-one, Archival, Researcher-centric and Subject. The team also compared open source vs. in-house repository providers and services including DSpace, Digital Commons, IR+, and Discovery Garden. A decision was made to move from the open source software DSpace to the full-service hosted software bepress from Digital Commons. The new repository will have a narrower research focus and will be rebranded RIT Scholar Works. It will be launched in fall of 2013. This article describes the configuration approaches that were considered and how each approach would impact the Digital Media Library, leading to the final recommendation

Choosing a Repository Platform: Open Source vs. Hosted Solutions

Discusses selection of a locally hosted, open-source system (DSpace/Fedora) versus a cloud-hosted, proprietary system (Digital Commons), it is important to note that these examples are merely illustrative. Libraries have a range of choices for repository software that includes open source and proprietary in any number of support environments, and exemplary repositories are flourishing on a variety of systems, both open source and proprietary. This chapter focuses on the differences between proprietary and open-source solutions, but also demonstrates how and why libraries choose a repository system. In writing about this process, we realized that it was important to acknowledge that there are two different audiences for this chapter: those who may just be starting out with building a repository at their institution, and those with an established repository who are considering a platform change. Thus, this chapter addresses the challenges and opportunities of platform selection in both circumstances