I understand what you are trying to do.... and, in theory, it's a good idea.

If the departmental eprints were standard (unmodified) systems, then
each one can export records in the EPrint-XML format, and that will be
the same for all repositories.... and thus compatible with the main
Institution-level one.

Where things start to fall down is when repositories become modified....
and I don't mean in the templates and the way the web pages are
displayed - I mean in the contents stored for each record:

If one department classifies articles by research group, and another by
subject classification, then you can't merge them.

On 03/04/15 14:55, Bjoern Hassler wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've got a newbie question, apologies if it's obvious.
>
> Is anybody in this situation: Several eprints instances within an
> institutiton (e.g. at departmental level), with an overall institutional
> level repository (populated entirely through OAI Harvester or otherwise)?
>
> Is this essentially supported out of the box by installing an
> institution-level eprints instance, and letting it harvest the
> departmental level instances?
>
>  From a users perspective, is the functionality is the same (i.e.
> equally smooth, same look and feel, etc)? I.e. is there a difference
> between "native" records (say departmental level) and "harvested"
> records (institutional level), from the users perspective? By "user" I
> mean the person browsing the repository ("anonymously") on the web -
> obviously there's a difference from the contributors perspective.
>
> Does it make sense for the institutional repository to harvest
> departmental repositories? Or would it be preferable to have a single
> institutional repository and generate listings for departments from it
> (which should be viewable within the sub-domain owned by the
> department)? If the latter is preferable, what would be the simplest way
> of doing that? (Set up departmental repository, and let it harvest the
> institutional one? Or are there other e.g. API-based options?)

--

Ian Stuart.
Developer: ORI, RJ-Broker, and OpenDepot.org
Bibliographics and Multimedia Service Delivery team,
EDINA,
The University of Edinburgh.

http://edina.ac.uk/

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Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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