Page 41 - Building Digital Libraries

CHAPTER 2

Automation

• Supports bulk ingest, export, and maintenance of resources
and metadata for use, analysis, or migration purposes

• Leverages embedded metadata and standards appropriate
to materials
• Machine interface to interact with outside systems

• Supports protocols to interact with required outside
systems
• Programmable and/or language-based method to
manipulate data

Access Control

• Authenticates using required authentication systems
• Supports appropriate controls for staff, user, and automated
functions
• Supports required rights, privacy, and life-cycle controls
• Reports access settings of objects in the repository

Resource and Data Management
• Maintains version control if appropriate

• Converts to appropriate formats
• Conforms with legal and institutional storage requirements
• Ensures integrity of resources and metadata

The most important aspect of choosing a repository architecture is to ensure
that it is designed to meet the needs at hand. A repository’s platform, poli-
cies, procedures, resources, and metadata are closely related. For this reason,
platform choice must be driven by the needs identified as the reason for
creating the repository, while taking into account the ability of the library
to support it in terms of expertise, time, money, and institutional support.
Asking the right questions early in the process will maximize your chances
of success.

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