How do Digital Repositories Work

1
How do Digital Repositories Work?

• Thornton Staples
• Fedora Commons, Inc.

2
What do we mean, Institutional Repository

• Is it a place to cherish some PDF files?
• Is it about use and re-use of the content or just
  preservation?
• Is a repository part of a network of
  inter-related repositories?
• Is a repository used to construct and manage the
  publication from the beginning?

3
What is the nature of the publication?

• A PDF file?
• An illustrated narrative?
• A science article that includes datasets?
• A virtual exhibition?
• An electronic critical edition?
• Does it support annotation and other social
  participation?

4
Beyond a PDF....

• These entities are usually heterogeneous
  combinations of more than one type of content
• The can include complex relationships among the
  content components
• They will increasingly include components that
  are not under the control of the author or
  sponsoring institution
• Increasingly, they will include as components, or
  have important relationships to, born-digital
  content, not just surrogates for physical objects

5
Repository Systems

• EPrints is a vertically integrated application
  that is specifically oriented around documents
  and articles
• DSpace is also a vertically integrated
  application that has a more general conception of
  content
• If the content that you are managing fits their
  models both provide a reasonably complete system
  for managing it.
• Fedora is a foundation of services upon which
  many information management applications can be
  built
• Applications built upon Fedora for
  domain-specific information management are
  beginning to appear

6
Persistent Identifiers (PIDs)?

• Names for resources that uniquely identify them
  without respect to their location
• One of the main jobs of a repository is to manage
  the content on the back-end, while publicly
  maintaining the PIDs
• A repository can maintain a unique PID for an
  object that is then exposed using one or more
  schemes

7
Workflow

• Provide submission processes that enforce content
  and metadata standards at ingestion
• Relationships among the content components must
  be maintained throughout the process
• Audit trails for actions on the repository must
  be maintained
• It is important to maintain versions of content
  upon updating
• Should provide for review and approval processes
• Social processes require a complete workflow

8
Discovery and Access

• Expose metadata or full-text to harvesting
  services, such as Google or OAI
• Provide specialist access to indexed metadata or
  full text
• As publications become more complex, more
  metadata standards will have to be supported
• Endlessly federating searches does not seem to be
  the answer

9
Use and Re-use of Content

• The point of searching is finding!
• Content should be available in flexible ways to
  be used by an array of tools
• Content discovered in one context should be
  reusable in another
• The repository must be able to exchange content
  with other repositories

10
Sustaining Digital Information

• Preserving the components such that they can be
  reloaded in case of loss
• Keeping the data technically viable, migrating
  the content to new encodings, as necessary.
• Vouching for the veracity and authenticity of the
  information, both content and structure
• Relationships to content that is outside the
  repositories control must be maintained or
  gracefully degraded

11
Establishing and Enforcing Policies

• Policies must be established for the entire
  life-cycle of the information
• Ownership and workflow policies
• Access and use policies
• Policies associated with sustaining (or not!)?
• Policy information can be based on assumptions
  built into the software, encoded in metadata to
  be handed off to other processes, and/or managed
  and used as data in the repository
• Polices must be expressed for end users
• Policies must also be expressed for machine access

12
Towards Community Repositories

• The repository becomes the medium for scholarly
  communication within a network
• Content creators own their content and control
  all policies associated with it
• Authorship becomes a process of adding nodes and
  arc to a worldwide network of content
• Transfer ownership to other sophisticated
  repositories (digital libraries?) to be sustained
  in the long term
• Community repositories could be hosted by
  publishers or professional societies