Building an open platform across diverse content and technologies

Repository management and publication systems are adopted or evolve within specific academic and research environments to meet short term goals and manage content in the longer term. At Caltech this evolution has resulted in purpose-specific repositories including: Islandora and ArchivesSpace for archival objects and metadata; EPrints for theses, published articles, unpublished papers, and books; and Invenio for research data. This diversity requires a variety of skills to manage, generates unacceptable levels of technical debt, and hampers the ability of our end users to access our resources easily. Additionally none of these systems individually supports open aggregation of content for both derivative and new research purposes. This presentation will discuss a variety of evolutionary strategies to move our repository ecosystem to one that (1) exposes our diverse data in consistent ways that promote dynamic use and reuse; (2) supports a full range of services, from public access to digital preservation; and (3) minimizes technical diversity as much as possible, in order to promote sustainability and efficiency. Our objective is to reposition our current set of independent repositories as a single, dynamic node on the web, capable of providing users with an integrated view of diverse content in an open environment.