Hi Ian,

   Before I start I'll give fair warning I'm the developer of the IR+
system - which is an institutional repository. Which we like a lot
needless to say. 

You have quite a question and it depends on what your particular needs
are.  

Some of the things you may want to think about are:


Do you want to/have the resources to manage the repository yourself
(Developers/System Administrator)?
- if not you may want to consider a hosted solution?  For example
Digital commons by Bepress 

Do you want to have access to paid support?

- If so you may want to look into open source systems that have support
venders for example @mire supports DSpace systems.  

How much do you want to customize the repository?

- If you want to customize it heavily or add features then an open
source solution might be better - IR+/Fedora/DSpace/Eprints/
 
- Watch out for this though - unless you are part of the development
team it can sometimes be hard to get your features integrated into one
of these systems and changes will be incompatible making upgrading
painful.

What do you want the repository to do?  

- Do you want faculty and staff to use it or will librarians/catalogers
be doing most of the work?  We wrote IR+ because we wanted to convince
faculty to start using and getting involved with our institutional
repository.  

Some things you may want to look at are:

- Authority Control for:
   - General Meta-data
   - Author Names
   - How hard is it to fix the metadata?

- Statistics to show usage (Download Counts/Page Views).
  - Identifying all the downloads for a particular work

- Social Aspects of the repository:

   - Showing off all of a given authors work / Faculty or otherwise
   - IR+ and bibapp might be good examples of trying to help with social
aspects of the repostiory.  I'm not quite sure if bibapp is still being
developed.
   - Bepress also has   

- Images
  
   - Thumbnails tend to be important

- Batch import of data into the repository (how hard is it)
   
- Thesis and dissertation management tends to be important with many
IR's - Setting embargo's and permissions are usually important here.

- User/permission and collection management - how hard is it to manage
users and the collections

- OAI harvesting 

- Integration into existing LDAP or other authentication systems can
also be important

It can be quite daunting to compare all of these repositories. Knowing
if you want to go open source or not may help you narrow down your
choices.  Then looking at the repositories in those particular areas
will make your life a little bit easier.

Feel free to ask me any questions you may have about IR+.  We have lots
of information about IR+ here:  http://www.irplus.org

I hope this helps. 

-Nate

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Ian Chan
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2011 2:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] institutional repository applications - comparisons
and/or your experience

Hi,

I'm looking for comparisons of, and your experience with, institutional
repository applications.  What are the key features? What do you like,
or
don't like, about your current system?

Thanks,

--------------------------------------------------

Ian Chan 
Web Development Librarian
California State University San Marcos
http://biblio.csusm.edu/people/ichan
http://microsites.csusm.edu/librarywebdev/
760.750.4385 [office]
760.683.4234 [mobile]