PEPIA: a Norwegian collaborative effort for institutional repositories.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to report on Project for Electronic Publications and Institutional Archives (PEPIA), which is a government-sponsored Norwegian effort, to provide institutional repositories to multiple Norwegian universities, university colleges and other research institutions through a consortium managed by BIBSYS. Design/methodology/approach - Some aspects of the project are headlined to give a brief introduction to the PEPIA project and the problems associated with creating a consortium with multiple institutions on one software platform. Findings - The ongoing project PEPIA has shown that it is possible for multiple organizations to join forces and create a consortium to develop an institutional repository on one software platform. After an initial requirements specification phase it was found that most institutions have the same basic requirements, even though they may seem different. The requirements, besides basic registration and searching, are mostly centered on integration with library systems, research documentation systems, national OAI harvesters and preferably learning management systems. The experience with the freely available DSpace software is mostly good, but the work of integrating the software into an already existing software development platform and production environment was more complex than estimated. The user management mechanisms in DSpace is too simplistic but the development of a more advanced rule-based access mechanisms for collections has resulted in a lot easier management by users, and can further lower the operating costs for the members of the consortium. Originality/value - The paper provides an overview of the PEPIA project, which enables more and more institutions to see the benefits of working together towards better solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]