Building a Distributed, Standards-based Repository Federation

Abstract

This article presents the architecture developed for the China Digital Museum Project, a collaborative project involving the Chinese Ministry of Education, Hewlett-Packard Company and several Chinese universities, with Beihang University as the main technical partner. Repositories (such as DSpace) in a federation can replicate metadata and content from others by harvesting METS Dissemination Information Packages via OAI-PMH. The CNRI Handle System® is used to uniquely identify objects in the federation and to keep track of their multiple locations. A central registry of repositories in the federation allows participating repositories to discover new repositories and changes to existing ones. The central registry also features an "available mirrors" user interface, which enables users to select which physical copy of an object to access. Various use cases for the architecture are described, including the China Digital Museum Project use case. This article also describes a federation of Institutional Repositories sharing content and metadata for preservation purposes