DEPTAL: A Framework for Institutional Repositories

This paper describes DEPTAL, an open and flexible framework for institutional repositories reusing open-source technology. DEPTAL is a collection-centric system that manages collections of documents in multiple copies and types. It can manage also users and groups of users, it supports authority control (subjects, authors, etc.), and can interoperate with other systems by interfaces such as OAI-PMH, Z39.50, SRU, web services, etc. DEPTAL recognizes descriptive metadata such as UNIMARC and Dublin Core, and organizes the information objects as HTML sites, with descriptions in the METS structural schema, making it very easy to backup and export those objects. For searching, it interoperates with MITRA, a search engine based on LUCENE, which was extended with new features to index not only the full content but also to recognize the structured metadata.