A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Repository Software

Abstract

This proposal outlines the design of a comparative analysis of the four institutional repository software packages that were represented at the 4th International Conference on Open Repositories held in 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia: EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and Zentity (The 4th International Conference on Open Repositories website, https://or09.library.gatech.edu). The study includes 23 qualitative and quantitative measures taken from default installations of the four repositories on a benchmark machine with a predefined base collection. The repositories are also being assessed on the execution of four common workflows: consume, submit, accept, and batch. A panel of external reviewers provided feedback on the design of the study and its evaluative criteria, and input is currently being solicited from the developer and user communities of each repository in order to refine the criteria, measures, data collection methods, and analyses. The aim is to produce a holistic evaluation that will describe the state of the art in repository software packages in a comparative manner, similar in approach to Consumer Reports (Consumer Reports magazine website, http://www.consumerreports.org). The output of this study will be highly useful for repository developers, repository managers, and especially those who are selecting a repository for the first time. As members of these respective communities and the organizations who support them are increasingly collaborating (e.g, DuraSpace), this study will help identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of each repository to inform the "best-of-breed" in future solutions that may be developed. The study’s methods will be presented in a transparent manner with documentation to support their reproducibility by a third party.