A funder repository of heterogeneous grey literature material with advanced user interface and presentation features

The present contribution concerns the development of a funder repository aiming at the dissemination, reuse and preservation of mainly grey literature material of diverse types. This material which was produced under the auspices of large scale (multi-billion Euros) funding programmes of the Hellenic Ministry of Education, cofinanced by the European Union. The project involved the handling of a wide range of content, like studies, reports, educational material, videos, theses, material from a range of conferences/events. The project has been successfully completed and the system is publicly available since spring 2011 at http://repository.edulll.gr. In this repository creation use case, technical enhancements were used to provide the means to organise, process and import to the repository a wide range of heterogeneous material. Special facilities for the support of these workflows was included, along with enhanced user viewing capabilities for metadata, PDF files and video content, providing an end user experience suitable for the repositoty’s users, which include the educational community, researchers and scientists and the general public The metadata schema used is an application profile using elements for Qualified Dublin core, LOM and PREMIS. The repository has been implemented using the DSpace platform, with significant extensions developed specifically for this project. Futhermore a supplement external lightweight CRIS system has being developed in internal beta version, in order to appropriately represent semantically rich information. The rest of the article at first explains the overall project scope and the followed methodology and approach, including important issues encountered and relevant decisions that had to be made. Implementations aspects, particularly regarding metadata schema and workflows are presented in Section 3. Advanced repository features are described in Section 4 and the paper concludes with summary, lessons learnt and ideas for future work.