Hi Josh,

Yes and no. Certainly a lot of work has been done in separating the layers
of activity/service so that stacks could be built that would be uniquely
useful to a particular organization. Here at K-State we've done a little
investigating of using blacklight as our presentation layer and having it
interact with DSpace through its extremely useful RESTful API, but given
our other workload we haven't had much time to pursue that. We're seeing
variations on Blacklight, Hydra, and Fedora based stacks out there . . . I
haven't worked with those tools but I'd like to. However, all of these
approaches still seem to bundle a particular set of services together as an
IR. As others have pointed out, that certainly isn't essential, at least
hypothetically, as long as those services are served to users in a way that
either brands them together relatively seamlessly, or delivers the overall
service set of an IR successfully through other modalities.

Best regards,

*Jason Bengtson*


*http://www.jasonbengtson.com/ <http://www.jasonbengtson.com/>*

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 9:53 AM, Josh Welker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Jason,
>
> To your knowledge, have any libraries approached IR as a set of services
> divorced from a particular software platform? In my albeit limited
> experience, the IR and the platform used to host the IR are used almost
> synonymously. That is perhaps a barrier to entry for smaller libraries who
> could do the service work of collecting objects, creating metadata, etc,
> but do not have the resources to invest in DSpace or Digital Commons.
>
> Joshua Welker
> Information Technology Librarian
> James C. Kirkpatrick Library
> University of Central Missouri
> Warrensburg, MO 64093
> JCKL 2260
> 660.543.8022
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 9:27 AM, Jason Bengtson <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > Josh,
> >
> > If you have funds (or you anticipate saving enough funds by ending local
> > dspace support), a SAAS platform like what Tom suggests is worth
> > considering, so it's worthwhile to throw contentDM into the mix. I'll be
> > honest; I never cared for it (the platform lacked flexibility to me), but
> > we had it at one library I've worked at, and, if your needs are modest,
> it
> > might meet them. It's completely hosted, so the local hosting overhead is
> > eliminated. There's also Digital Commons, although I've also found them
> too
> > limited for my uses in the past, and since their recent change in
> ownership
> > I would regard them dubiously. The thing I would be most careful with,
> for
> > both of those products, would be having a plan in place to migrate your
> > data out of them should circumstances change. I've heard of some
> challenges
> > on that front in Digital Commons (although I have no direct experience in
> > that area, and things may have improved since I heard that feedback), and
> > I'm not sure what the migration options look like in contentDM.
> >
> > Here at K-State we use DSpace, but we host our instance on Amazon Web
> > Services rather than through local physical or virtual boxes. My systems
> > folks have been very happy with this move, which, while keeping us in
> full
> > control of our boxes, has eased some aspects of their management and
> > provided us with enhanced reliability.
> >
> > All that having been said, I really like what you, Jonathan, and Tom have
> > said about looking at looking at an IR as a set of services and
> > 'interrogating' what that means and how those services might be
> delivered.
> > I think we, as a profession, need to do that for a variety of products,
> > including IRs and catalogs.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > *Jason Bengtson*
> >
> >
> > *http://www.jasonbengtson.com/ <http://www.jasonbengtson.com/>*
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 1:51 PM, Josh Welker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > > We're a mid-sized university library (10,000 fte) trying to get an IR
> off
> > > the ground to showcase student and faculty research. We've had a DSpace
> > > instance running for several years, but we use so few of its features
> > that
> > > DSpace ends up being more trouble than it is worth. In particular, it's
> > > very frustrating to deal with metadata editing, file management, the
> > Handle
> > > URL system, and HTML/CSS theming.
> > >
> > > I am considering leaving the DSpace model in favor of our "IR" just
> > being a
> > > glorified FTP site that MARC records in our catalog can point to. I
> might
> > > even build a tiny frontend using some scripting language to add IP
> > > authentication, URL redirect stuff, or a Google Scholar interface, but
> > > that's really it. No metadata modelling, no preservation features, no
> > > indexing.
> > >
> > > Does anyone have experience using a very small, file-based (as opposed
> to
> > > database-driven) application as a foundation for an IR? Are there any
> > > problems I should anticipate?
> > >
> > > Joshua Welker
> > > Information Technology Librarian
> > > James C. Kirkpatrick Library
> > > University of Central Missouri
> > > Warrensburg, MO 64093
> > > JCKL 2260
> > > 660.543.8022
> > >
> >
>