Softwares for Development of Institutional Repository

According to data culled from ROAR in February 2008, number of repositories powered by various softwares / platforms are:

Repository Software	No. of Repositories
DSpace	271
EPrints	243
Bepress	58
OPUS	26
ETD-db	24
DiVA	16
CDSWare	9
Fedora	9
Open Repository	9
HAL	7
ARNO	5
DoKs	5
Fez/Fedora	4
MyCoRe	4
SciX	2
OJS	1
Others	300

DSpace and EPrints has majority of Installation base.  'bepress' stands for Berkeley Electronic Press which produces number of tools for content production and dissemination. Digital Commons is their hosted software / service for Institutional Repositories. The OPUS interfaces and documentation are primarily in German. ETD-db consists of a series of web pages and perl scripts that interact with a MySQL database. DiVA (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet in Swedish) is from universities of Scandinavia and developed at Uppsala University Library, Sweden. CDS Invenio (formerly CDSware) is unique in the sense that it uses MARC 21 as its underlying bibliographic standard. Latest version is CDS Invenio v0.92.1, released in February 2007. Fedora Commons provides sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content. Please do not confuse this with the RedHat supported linux project for community based development and distribution of Linux. Open Repository like 'bepress' is a service from BioMed Central which runs over DSpace. HAL is a repository platform rather instead of a software. ARNO Software is from ARNO project (Academic Research in the Netherlands Online) which aims to develop and implement university document servers to make available the scientific output of participating institutions. DoKS (Document and Knowledge Sharing application)  is a digital library tool that makes it easy to publish, store, share and find documents online. The original focus of the project is the publication of ETDs from Flemish Institutes for Higher Education.It can be downloaded from sourceforge.net. Fez/Fedora a Web-based digital repository and workflow management software system based on Fedora 2.1 It is PHP and MySQL based and works as a front-end and administration tool. MyCoRe uses Java and XML/XSL technologies and supports various backend systems for management and querying of content. Apart from Open Source backends like MySQLand Apache Lucene it also supports commercial backend systems like Oracle, IBM DB2 and IBM Content Manager. SciX Open Publishing Services (SOPS) is software that allows setting up various on-line scientific publishing media. However the SciX Project has been completed in 2004. So not many new developments may be expected. OJS is actually a very good open source software for managing online publishing of scholarly journals. However from the above data table it has also been used for repository. The above table also shows that number of local softwares and systems have been developed for establishing institutional repositories.

The ultimate decision for selecting a  repository software zeros down to DSpace and EPrints. Both are good candidates. EPrints uses PERL language and goes well with Standard LAMP configuration. DSpace is built on JAVA technology and runs on Tomcat. However internal a gateway can be established between Apache and Tomcat. In that case requests are handled by apache and processed by Tomcat internally.