A new institutional repository for Curtin: decisions we made along the way Janice Chan 0000-0001-7300-3489

If you could do it all over again… If you can do it all over again…. What would you do differently?

Decisions Photo credit: Dominic Hargreaves https://flic.kr/p/LqUFzX We spent over a year on the evaluation and selection of a new software, but once a decision is made, we have a strict timeline to meet. There are a lot of decisions that we need to make along the way, and we don’t have a lot of time to think about them. Photo credit: Dominic Hargreaves https://flic.kr/p/LqUFzX

Sustainability, flexibility, interoperability

external vendor (Atmire) Local IT staff vs external vendor (Atmire) We have Library IT staff, but they look after many systems and have competing priorities. We decided to engage a vendor Atmire to do the migration, DSpace is what they do, and they know the software inside out. We also purchased a support contract with Atmire. So for every development in the near future, we have the flexibility to choose between local IT staff or Atmire. We did have to give up a few things on the wish list in order to afford this, but I think it’s worth it. Photo credit: David R Harper https://flic.kr/p/csWmzN

Symplectic Elements Repository Tools 1 vs Repository Tools 2 espace Elements We also decided to delay integration with Elements so that we can take advantage of Repository Tool 2, it was still in development at the time. RT2 – integrates via API, light weight, repo as a data source – data flow both ways. During this time, we do ad-hoc batch ingests into the repository to maintain service. Barely noticeable from the client’s perspective.

Organisational structure vs simple structure by type “Traditional faculty and school structure” is very labour intensive to maintain. We have a community called espace, and currently there are two collections, Curtin Theses and Research Papers. We’re going to add grey literature collection to this community as well. Faculty and school information is in the metadata, users can browse via the discovery facets. If in the future espace needs to accommodate other materials such as research data and open educational resources, we will create separate communities for those.

dc.relation.sponsoredby Metadata standards, best practices, guidelines… During the migration process, we took the opportunity to clean up our metadata, it’s still a work in progress. In this process we kept interoperability and linkage in mind. - Australasian Repository Working Group We didn’t have resources to implement everything during migration, so we setup our metadata fields in a way that will allow us to implement metadata standards and controlled vocabularies down the track. dc.relation.sponsoredby dc.rights.uri

Thank you 26 June 17 | CAUL Research Repositories Community Event