University of Pretoria

Client Profile


Location South Africa
Based on DSpace 1.5.2
Repository Link UPSpace

The University of Pretoria (UP) is the leading research university in South Africa and one of the largest in the country. In 2008, student numbers totaled 57 409 (38 934 contact and 18 475 distance).

The University has six campuses and a number of other sites of operation such as the Pretoria Academic Hospital. The University of Pretoria offers its more than 1800 academic programs in two of the official languages, namely Afrikaans and English. UPSpace, is the full text open access digital research repository of the University of Pretoria.

Customizations

In 2008, The University of Pretoria required technical intervention in order to upgrade DSpace from an earlier version to the 1.4.2 release. Furthermore, the metadata had to be converted to the UTF-8 characterset, a tedious and error-prone task. @mire enabled and configured The Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting extension, in order to automatically share the contents of the repository.

Other customizations include:

  • Automated embargo handling
  • Request Copy feature on individual item pages

The University of Pretoria then opted for @mire's DSpace Service Level Agreement to handle (technical) support request in a swift and efficient manner. Under that service level agreement several issues have been resolved and also an upgrade to DSpace version 1.5.2. has been executed.

Training

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