The DiVA System: Current Status and Ongoing Development

The DiVA system, originally developed at Uppsala University, has evolved out of a scholarly repository and publishing system solely used by one university into a system used and further developed in collaboration with seventeen universities in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The system consists of several modules which are entirely built on XML and Java technologies. This modularisation facilitates the possibility of enhancement of the system. Moreover, it increases the scalability of the system. This paper describes the current status of some of these modules. Furthermore it gives an insight into the ongoing development. The DiVA publishing system supports work flows for printing as well as digital publishing of scholarly documents. The repository holds metadata and full-text documents for doctoral theses, master and student theses, research reports, and articles. The metadata and files can be accessed freely via a joint portal, local search services, and with OAI-PMH. The metadata and files are packaged and sent to the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm for archiving and also archived locally in a dark archive. The DiVA consortium is at present engaged in a discourse on the usage of DiVA as a repository for postand pre-prints. In addition to that, the development team researches for ways to evolve DiVA from a dark archive into an archive implementing the OAIS model. Introduction and Background In 2000, Uppsala University1 decided to start a project whose main objective would be to publish all scholarly work of the university electronically. The Electronic Publishing Centre (henceforth referred to as EPC) has been operational since September 2000. The main goal of the EPC is to support researchers and students of the university with user-friendly and effective tools and to help them publish their research results, as well as to create solutions for publishing and archiving. This institutional repository contains digital documents published at Uppsala University which can be searched in a structured form simultaneously with the library catalogue and other relevant search services and to offer metadata to information services which are relevant to the dissemination of information regarding research in Uppsala”.2 This was extended to also provide the access, use and understanding of digital objects in the long term. It was decided to build a system based on open standards, and to incorporate open source software where possible. Moreover, we opted for XML3 and Unicode4 for the metadata files and for the full-text files as well. As we have always been aware that it would take some time to accomplish these goals, we decided to use PDF5 for the full-text files initially and to implement XML support from the very beginning. We developed the DiVA system. DiVA is the acronym for Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet which translates as Academic Archive Online. DiVA has evolved out of a scholarly repository, 1Home page Uppsala University. 2Home page Electronic Publishing Centre. 3XML specifications. 4Unicode home page. 5PDF reference.