Does anyone have any experience and/or advice on administering multiple
installations of DSpace/Manakin applications? Our plan is to have about a
dozen installations of the DSpace and Manakin web applications by early
Spring, and then build up to approximately 100 installations as they are
needed. Each installation will belong to a separate institution or
organization, typically an academic library.
We will be performing customizations to the software. Some customizations
will apply only to an individual instance; others will be global. We will
also need a way to search/browse for items globally across all instances.
It's likely that we'll collect OAI/PMH records into an external tool to
implement the global search.
I'm interested in collecting information about memory/disk cache
requirements, any tools that have been developed for applying updates and
customizations to multiple instances of the web applications, and any
changes to tools, handle servers, etc. that are necessary/helpful for this
type of setup.
I recently saw an example of a multiple institution repository that is
running under a single instance of the application here:
http://dspace.nitle.org/ (NITLE DSpace Service ).
Managing multiple institutions under a single instance of the DSpace
application is an interesting approach. It looks like it would simplify
administration for the developers and engineers, make global search work
automatically, and possibly reduce system requirements. I'm not sure that
it would work in our situation here, though, for several reasons:
1. Customizations. We're unsure specifically which customizations each
institution will need, and we may not be able to implement a customization
for one institution without affecting another if they're running in the same
application space.
2. Control. Our goal is to give each institution as much control over
their space as possible, and we're not sure that we'd be able to do this if
they all shared the same application space. One example is that we've had
problems giving institution heads control to add subcommunities/collections
to a community in Manakin, without giving them full administrative access to
the system. If each institution "owned" their own instance, we'd avoid this
problem, and possibly other unknown issues.
3. Scalability. How much load can a single set of DSpace/Manakin web
applications handle? If necessary, does the DSpace application cluster
well? If clustered, would the clustered applications still talk to a single
database, or should the database also be replicated?
Any advice, statistics, anecdotes from anyone about experiences managing
DSpace for multiple parties with differing needs?
Thanks,
Keith Gilbertson
Systems Developer
OhioLINK
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