Hi Ben (and anyone who might be curious), 

Our current IR was built 10 years ago in-house using C# and SharePoint, and feeds a MySQL database. It's primarily used for documents (technical reports and journal articles authored by ORNL scientists), but is also sometimes used for images, conference posters, presentations, and so forth. From an administrative perspective, it's difficult to work with (querying, workflow, etc.). From an end-user perspective, the submission process is complex. From a metadata perspective, it's all unstandardized and very messy. 

So, it's time to re-think the whole thing: we'd like to simplify the submission process for our users, simplify things for administrators, and the appease the metadata police (me). To what degree this is possible remains to be seen...but we're encouraged by the numerous IR solutions already available, and are interested in exploring how they might meet our needs/how they might help us avoid re-creating some of the difficulties we've run into with our current system.  However, none of the library staff have any experience with the IR platforms out there, so any kind of inside info about working with Islandora, DSpace, hosted solutions, etc. would be tremendously helpful. We are lucky in that we have plenty of on-hand developers at the Lab, so open-source is definitely an option for us, but since the library will ultimately be managing the IR we want to make sure that we don't select something that requires an advanced degree in computer science to maintain on a day-to-day basis.

Thanks so much to those of you who have responded already. This community is the best!

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ben Companjen
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2016 10:04 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Institutional repositories

Hi Katie,

Although I am not the best person to give opinions about repository software in general, could I ask you to share reasons for considering a different IR system?
What would you like the software to do that your current software doesn't? What do your users say about your current IR?

I assume you don't want to spend a lot of time and money to end up with a system that is very similar to the current one.

Regards,

Ben




On 21-03-16 14:41, "Code for Libraries on behalf of Knight, Kathryn E." <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:

>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