DSpace vs Fedora Ralph LeVan OCLC Research

What Do You Want From a Repository? How do you create your metadata? How do you assemble your objects? How do you support your user communities? How do you integrate your repository with other systems? How do you expose your objects to users?

DSpace: pros A web site for storing digital objects –Pages for listing and describing content –Workflow to allow the work to be shared among several people A web site for finding digital objects –Search for the metadata that describes the objects. (The metadata record has pointers to the actual objects.)

DSpace: cons Web environment suitable for single item entry –Minimal tools for batch import Archival model –Assumes that all objects are static; no support for versioning Objects not easily retrieved –Certainly not with the behavior they had before entry Scalability? –Users complaining with 30K objects

Fedora: pros Rich API’s for Searching, Storing and Retrieving objects –Should be easy to integrate with other systems (e.g. E-Learning systems) Rich Object Behavior –Mechanisms for describing the tools that can act on the object (e.g. viewers) Scalability? –Claim to be able to support 1M objects Batch Support –Can import or export multiple documents easily

Fedora: cons There’s no “there” there –No web presence at all! Inactive? –Activity on the user group mailing list is less than one message a week. No tools for assembling objects

What Do You Want From a Repository? Don’t you want it all? –Rich interface for entering metadata and assembling objects –Version control for non-static objects –Support for communities –Objects with clever behavior –Rich API’s for Searching, Storing and Retrieving objects

DSpace vsOver Fedora! Fedora DSpace OAI Harvester SearchHarvestRetrieveStore