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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 >