Repository Decision

  • Recognised early on that this would be foundational
  • Fedora was selected after considering its merits relative to DSpace and a number of other candidates for a number of reasons:
    • ARROW needed something it could build on top of (like Fedora)
      • rather than an existing application (like DSpace)
    • The object-oriented data model for Fedora was much more flexible
      • as opposed to DSpace's Repository-Community-Collection-Item-Bitstream hierarchy
    • ARROW wanted to be able to have persistent identifiers down to the level of individual datastreams
      • DSpace only has such identifiers for the item
      • As of DSpace 1.2, bitstreams in DSpace also have more 'persistent' identifiers, but they are still more volatile than Handles
    • ARROW wanted to be able to version both content and disseminators (which can be thought of as software behaviours for content)
      • DSpace versions neither content nor disseminators
    • The APIs are exposed much more openly and cleanly in Fedora (as well-documented SOAP/REST web services)
      • DSpace uses (at the time poorly documented) Java APIs
  • BUT, we have agreed to review this decision every 12 months