GNU EPrints 2 Overview

An overview of GNU EPrints 2. EPrints is free software which creates a web based archive and database of scholarly output and is intended for use by a university or university department. This article contains a description of the features and design philosophy of the software including OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), internationalisation of the interface via XML files containing all text used in the interface, internationalisation of metadata fields which may be entered in more that one language and an API for adding your own features. This article also discusses the costs of setting up an eprints archive, including staff time and hardware. 1 What is GNU EPrints 2? EPrints 1 was created to facilitate authors self archiving their work[10]. EPrints creates an on-line archive of “things”, consisting of metadata and files, which may be contributed via the web. These “things” are usually scholarly material such as research papers and thesis, but could by anything from recipes to recordings of the Grateful Dead. EPrints also makes the data about records in the archives available for harvesting by the OAI-PMH interface. Drawing from experiences of EPrints 1 [11, 12] we have learned that most users will want to use the software in similar, but distinctly different ways. This means that the software can never be “right”. Instead we have designed the software with configuration and customisation in mind.