Venturing into DSpace

After using EPrints for a repository that has earned me a bit of fame among Indian LIS professionals, I am now venturing into DSpace. Well this does not imply my preference to either of these.

So, the news is that I managed to install DSpace (1.6.2) on a RHEL 5 box.

Well, to admit, it was not smooth. However the following did helped me:

• DSpace Installation (Manual) in Redhat Linux

• AN ALMOST IDIOT'S GUIDE TO INSTALL AND UPGRADE TO POSTGRESQL 8.4 WITH YUM

• Howto Install Sun Java (JDK, JRE) on Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat

• JDK Installation

• DSpace 1.5.2 installation procedure on CentOS 5.3

• Installing DSpace on CentOS 5

• Apache virtual hosting with Tomcat and mod_jk

I got struck at two places. First it was problem with 'xml-commons-apis'. It was missing. When I installed it by

'yum install xml-commons-apis', Yum automatically removed Sun Java. I had to re-install Sun Java. Second time I got struck with 'ant fresh_install'. The problem was with

Downloading http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz

The server was not able to download GeoLiteCity.dat.qz file. I had to cheat 'ant fresh_install' by downloading the file from alternative location and placing it on my server and then tweaking the installation script.

Now finally the DSpace 1.6.2 is working for me. But, I have yet started.

Where do Indian Open Access Repositories stand in world ranking?

January 2010 Edition of the "The Ranking Web of World repositories" is now available. Cybermetrics Lab has been bringing out such ranking of open access repositories for past few years.

Ranking of Indian Repositories in top 400 world's repositories is given below:

82 - Indian Institute of Science Bangalore ePrints

148 - Openmed

180 - Indian Statistical Institute Digital Library

218 - Indian Institute of Astrophysics Dspace

245 - National Institute of Oceanography India Digital Repository

278 - Raman Research Institute Digital Repository

370 - National Aerospace Laboratories Institutional Repository

Visibility occupies more weight in their methodology as compared to number of documents in repository.



So, how does India score - Good, bad or just OK?