Hi Kelsey,

While I highly recommend Islandora for this use case, I completely understand your point about not having the technical expertise to support Fedora, it can be a pain to set up and maintain. If you are considering a more minimal choice like Drupal, you might want to also consider Omeka. It's a LAMP app like Drupal, but it has a pretty simple UI (more Wordpress-like) and it has been designed as a lightweight digital asset management system. I *believe* it can support PDFs and MS Word documents if you set it up with some plugins. I don't have any direct experience using Omeka for this use case, but its something you can look into if your other options don't pan out.

Bryan Brown
Florida State University Libraries
________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Charlie Morris <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, May 6, 2016 12:34:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] using drupal for a document repository

I guess I'm a little confused about what you want to do - and the key
question to me is "where are you storing your documents?" Biblio is a great
tool (haven't used it though) for storing bib records and searching on them
- documents that have DOIs that point elsewhere. That's as far as my
understanding goes though, you through your experience with it might know
what else it can do.

To build on Cary's advice, creating an interface to browse/search a
relatively small collection in Drupal is done regularly and is what Drupal
is meant for (custom content types is one of Drupal's main features). So,
if you want to build a Drupal site as both a document store and a place to
search, you could create content types and leverage the excellent Solr
integrations <https://www.drupal.org/project/search_api_solr> that make
adding a Solr search fairly trivial for a technologist. I'm not sure where
the scale reaches its limit but with small collections of a few thousand
items it is very performant as I've worked with it. Hope this helps. Would
love to see what you have created in Drupal if you're willing to share.

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 5:15 PM, Kelsey Williamson <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi code4lib,
> I was hoping to get some input on this. My small, scrappy institution is
> considering using drupal as a repository, primarily via the Biblio module.
>
> Obviously this is not ideal, but for reasons I won't get into, our tech
> environment won't support ePrints or dspace, and hosted services are not an
> option either. We do not really have the level of technical expertise
> required to support any fedora-based applications, and cannot hire any
> additional support. There's a chance existing staff could stretch to get
> there, but it would not be a pretty process.
>
> With all that said, do any red flags come to mind? I looked through both
> code4lib and drupal4lib listserv archives and poked around google, but
> didn't find much evidence of anyone else using drupal in this way. Seems
> suspicious. While my gut tells me it's a bad idea (metadata! standards!
> preservation!), I'm having trouble articulating this to my group in a way
> that sticks, because using Biblio would be easy. I would appreciate hearing
> any other thoughts or opinions on this.
>
> Thanks!
> Kelsey
>