Whether your institution is a university, bachelor school, museum, research centre or library consortium, there can be good and very different reasons to introduce a repository. These reasons can vary from providing workflow support for the submission and management of Theses and Dissertations to increasing the impact of publication by improving online distribution and innovative archiving purposes.

Through careful analysis, @mire ensures your institution starts off with an appropriate and most of all realistic vision and strategy. In a second phase, @mire assists in tackling the technical aspects of repository setup such as installation and configuration.

• Analysis
  

  @mire distinguishes three different necessary phases of analysis. These analytic phases can either be executed by members of an institution, or by @mire. Experience has shown that neglection of any of these phases can cause important obstructions in the implementation and successful launch of your repository.

  
  Opportunity analysis looks at existing processes and workflows in handling different types of digital content to determine which kind of approach could provide substantial advantages. The main questions being handled during this analysis include:

  • What will be the repository's role in the institution's landscape of IT systems ?
  • Which goals and milestones can be set ?
  • How can your organization benefit from the use of a repository ? Which specific problems can be tackled ?
  • What other opportunities can arise when your organization should decide to implement a digital institutional repository?
  • Can the vision of the institution be compared to existing succesful repositories ? What are the differences ?

  
  The outcome of an opportunity analysis is a recommendation of possible repository architectures that would provide substantial added value. @mire's recommendation and vision are not only based on it's own projects, but also on learnings and knowledge from projects presented at one of the many conferences @mire attended.
  
  
  

  Requirements analysis takes opportunity analysis to the next level and investigates which aspects or features of the selected repository platform should be customized in order to fit the workflows and processes specific to your organization's need. Mind that @mire can perform these requirements analysis even when a certain repository architecture has already been selected, without prior @mire consulting.
  

  1. What are the practical implications of the repository implementation and what are the staffing requirements ?
  2. Which repository features are required to answer a specific need at the institution ?
  3. Which metadata (information describing a content item e.g. journal article) standard should be used and possibly customized and matched to an application profile?
  4. What digital content management, archiving and preservation strategies should the organization plan for, and which tools should be used to achieve those goals?

  
  The outcome of a requirements analysis is a clear business case of which repository features will provide most benefit for an organization's variety of users, including a project schedule and timeline. Requirements analysis also provides a clear indication of all related costs.

  Usability analysis include evaluations of your organization's current applications, in order to improve throughput and decrease support requests. Prototypes of new developments can be evaluated on usability as well. @mire conducts these studies in collaboration with a specialized laboratory, where every user action and gesture gets recorded.
  
  

  

  
  
  
  
• Basic Setup
  
  

  @mire provides technical services, to aid your IT department in the setup, installation and configuration of the DSpace repository system on your servers. The degree of involvement from your staff will determine the required interventions from @mire.
  
  Typically, the basic setup of the supporting infrastructure involves the creation of a database (either PosgreSQL or Oracle) and installing the necessary Apache Tomcat server and services at your organization's systems. Once the infrastructure is in place, the DSpace repository modules need to be deployed and configured.
  
  After configuring these modules, an empty repository is ready for use. This basic installation does not interact with your organization’s personnel databases, neither did data get imported from legacy systems. @mire also provides such services.