Comparative evaluation of open source digital library packages
Vinit Kumar · 2009
In the last decade the way to publish and access information has been changed a lot because of the availability of open access repositories. This became possible because of a varied range of open source repository packages. Other reasons like every year deduction in library budget and increasing urge to show more visibility of their institute, popular institutions also started establishing repositories. This paper starts with giving brief introduction of different open access models, open source philosophy and some of the expectations from a digital library package and tries to evaluate DSpace, EPrints and Greenstone. Purpose: This paper tries to evaluate some of the most popular digital library packages. It can help digital library administrators to decide among the available packages. Methodology: The evaluation is done by using a checklist having different categories. The categories are provided with weights according their importance for the package. Findings: The study shows that most of the softwares are in developing stage but are good at providing a good service. Among DSpace, EPrints and Greenstone. DSpace emerged as best option. 0 Introduction to Open source, open access archives. With the rapid deduction in library budget, crisis in scholarly publication, high cost of dissemination of research and the challenge of preservation caused a convergence of factors and created “a perfect storm” in the library and information world. This has given rise to aura of open source softwares to provide open access to the research literature/articles. 0.1 Open access: According to Peter Suber [14] “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder” The main aim or value that was associated with the upcoming of open access movement was to provide • long-term preservation of electronic resources • widest possible access to research and scholarship • respect for intellectual property rights There are two primary vehicles for delivering open access to research articles: • Open access Archives/Repositories (“Green OA”) OA archives can contain preprints, postprints(peer reviewed ), or both. • Open access Journals (“Gold OA”). 0.2 Open Source: The common understanding that is associated with open source software is that it is free, but OSI (Open Source Initiative) at www.opensource.org [10]defines open source comprehensively and highlights the following points: i. Free redistribution ii. Source code iii. Derived works iv. Integrity of the authors source code v. No discrimination among person or groups vi. No discrimination among fields of endeavour vii. Distribution of license viii.License must not be specific to a product ix. License must not restrict other software x. License must be Technology neutral. 0.2.1 Reason Behind Boost in Open source: Open source DL softwares because of its free access and good level of functionality are being used heavily as an alternative to commercial DL softwares. Gone are the days when it was only big companies who were producing software products, at present because of good communication system availability of open source softwares and decreasing cost of computing and other requisites, librarians and other persons from different fields are also joining their hands in development of open source softwares. The availability of the source code in open source softwares gives power to users to modify and make any changes or improvements to it, and such contributions can come from a community of programmers having different talents pools. 1 Digital libraries and archives : Digital libraries (DLs) facilitate creation, organisation and management of multimedia digital content and collections, and provide search, retrieval and other information services over computer networks and other electronic media. With the availability of a big list of open source digital library packages it is now too much tough for librarians, and repository managers to decide one out of those. So there is high need for evaluation of these packages. This paper tries to evaluate three most popular DL softwares. 1.1 Expectations from a DL software: Evaluation can only be done if and only if we have a detail list of expectations from a DL software. Broadly we can divide our expectations in following categories. Content Management: • Content Flow • Text and multimedia indexing and retrieval User Interface: • Personalisation and visualization • Multilingual support User administration: • Restricted access System administration: • Preservation standards support • Automatic indexing • Persistent document identification Other characteristics: • Document summarization and categorization • Interoperability • Complainant with DL standards • Documentation Content management feature is an important expectation from DL software. A DL software should be easy and functional in handling creation of content, submitting, reviewing and organizing. It should be able to provide searching and browsing functions such as metadata search, full-text search, and hierarchical subject browsing, additionally content encoded in various popular formats including text (e.g. ASCII, UNICODE, RTF), image (e.g. TIFF. GIF. JPEG), presentation (e.g. Adobe Postscript and Adobe PDF), structured formats(e.g. HTML and XML), audio and video (e.g. real, MP3. AVI and MPEG) ought to be supported. Second important feature is User interface. A DL software should provide flexibility in customizing the interface to suit the needs of different digital library implementations as well as the support for multilingual access. With multilingual access, the user is able to specify the language for the DLs user interface as well as the cataloguing information stored within it. Thirdly digital library deals with a lot of users like a traditional library so the user administration is also an important expected feature. This includes restricting access to content in the DL through password authentication, IP filtering, and proxy filtering. Specially when a particular DL content is in sensitive domain like defence but it is not encouraged in open access philosophy. Also one can monitor and report usage patterns. This usage patterns are analysed, the needs and interests of DL users can be better understood. End users of a system want to be able to organize the information space according to their own profiles based on their interest so we can say that personalisation and visualization is also an expected feature in DL. As like every software which provides service there is high requirement of back end maintenance same is applicable for DL software also. Functionality of automatic tools is useful particularly for large DLs where maintenance work is labour-intensive. Functions such as automated content acquisition, harvesting and automatic metadata generation, including named entity recognition and automatic subject indexing/classification, makes DL maintenance much easier. Apart from this a DL needs to support preservation standards as well as persistent document identification, so that the transfer of digital materials from one hardware/software configuration to another would not compromise reference citations and other links. This can be achieved only when a DL can offer functionality of handles and support for various available standards. Some other expectations would be document summarization and categorization which offers a user to overcome the information overload. A DL should also support interoperability so that it can communicate with other DLs. For this a lot of protocols like Z39.50, OAIPMH, SRU/SRW, SOAP are avaialable among these at least two basic interoperability protocols should be supported, viz. Z39.50 and OAI-PMH(Open Archive Initiative for Metadata Harvesting). Additionally, the DL must be compliant with standards established for DL collection and services. For e.g. For representation of Information XML; XHTML for web pages so that it can be accessed from small portable devices like Mobile and PDA's, TIFF, GIF and JPEG for images, Unicode for multilingual support and information interchange; and Dublin core and MARC 21 for metadata. Most importantly the DL package should provide mechanisms for support like documentation, manuals, mailing lists, discussion forums, bug tracking, feature request systems and formal helpdesk support. 2 Ways to evaluate DL packages: For effective evaluation there should be some framework to test. Punter[12] points out the following instruments can be used to accomplish this task. i. Static analysis of code, for structural measurement or anomaly checking ii. Dynamic analysis of code, for test coverage or failure data; iii. Reference tools that compare the software product iv. Reference statistical data; and v. Inspection with checklists. Although he further points that the first three are usually looked upon as well founded and applicable to software evaluation, experience shows that the use of checklists are necessary.