Digital Repositories
from Lorna Campbell, Kerry Blinco, and Jon Mason, Repository Management
and Implementation, DEST and JISC-CETIS, 2004.
A white paper for alt-i-lab 2004.
The core services that a repository should provide
- Alert -- Exposes updates
- Archiving -- Supports the long-term preservation (and managed destruction, if appropriate) of materials.
- Content Management -- Supports the publishing, retrieval, description, and organisation of information resources, including their lifecycle management.
- DRM -- Supports the allocation and application of rights policies against resources, consuming data in a digital rights expression language (DREL) to determine access.
- Format Conversion -- Supports transformation of information from one format to another; for example, from IMS Content Packaging to METS.
- Harvesting -- Allows harvesting copies of some or all metadata records.
- Identifier -- Supports the creation, registering and deregistering of identifiers for objects.
- Mapping -- Supports cross-mapping of values in different namespaces, such as crosswalks between metadata schema.
- Metadata Management -- Supports the management of metadata for objects, including creation, validation and retrieval.
- Packaging -- Supports the assembly of packages of information resources by aggregation and disaggregation, their preparation for transport and delivery, and ingestion
- Rating / Annotation -- Provides support for the creation, management and use of secondary metadata (user ratings and text annotations).
- Resource List -- Supports the creation, access and management of reading lists and other lists of resources.
- Resolver -- Provides location resolution services for identifiers or citations
- Search -- Supports the finding of information resources so on. Search will typically target a single search type (such as SRW) although a Search service can support multiple search types.
- Terminology -- Provides automated, machine-readable mappings between terms, either within a particular thesaurus or across multiple thesauri or classification schemes.
- Workflow -- Supports generic workflow management.
Simplistic 3-tiered overview of repositories
- Interface: the "public" face of the repository, where users search for and discover resources (the web page)
- Object repository: the space/structure where the documents/resources/objects are actually stored and managed (DSpace?, FEDORA, etc.)
- Metadata: the descriptive information about the objects/resources/documents stored in the repository (Dublin Core, METS, EAD, etc.)