Hi Katie, Here at Florida State University we recently migrated from Bepress Digital Commons to Islandora. We had been using Islandora previously for digital collections, but decided to save some money and start using it as our IR, too. Bepress Digital Commons was a fine choice a few years ago when we didn't have any developers, but now that our IT staff has grown we wanted something that we could manage ourselves.
I've learned a lot about open source projects during this transition. On the upside, its incredibly motivating to know that you can build a system out the way you want it; having an extensible system forces you to look at it in a much different way and you feel a lot more ownership over it. You can also look at the system as "unfinished", and continue to build new features onto it as your needs grow (or if your IR solution didn't meet some of your requirements from the beginning). Since you mentioned metadata arm waving, I will say that its a lot more fun working on an open source system if metadata is your thing. Being able to tweak the way the system handles metadata (validation/searching/display/etc) opens up a lot of possibilities. On the downside, the old joke about "free as in free puppy" definitely applies; there's no vendor to complain to when you don't like something, so you have to have a DIY attitude. I used to always recommend open source systems to people, but now that I support one I can see the value in paying a vendor for a hosted solution if you don't have developers on staff. -Bryan Brown ________________________________________ From: Code for Libraries <CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU> on behalf of Knight, Kathryn E. <knigh...@ornl.gov> Sent: Monday, March 21, 2016 9:41 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] Institutional repositories Hello all, My institution is working on a massive overhaul of our current institutional repository. At this point we're still deciding what to choose (DSpace, Invenio, etc.). Since I don't have much experience with IRs and so far all I can do in meetings is wave my arms and crow about metadata a bunch, I thought I'd appeal to the collective Code4Lib brain for some repository input. If you have an IR at your institution, what do you like about it? Hate? What about the end users? What is your submission process like? Anything you wish it could do that it doesn't? Etc. Please feel free to contact me off list with your thoughts, if you care to share-I'll keep all information confidential. Thanks so much, Katie Kathryn Knight Metadata and Cataloging Librarian Oak Ridge National Laboratory Research Library
