Moving into a new house: FSU Libraries updates and improves Research Repository

By Rachel Smart and Camille Thomas

In the Summer of 2021, FSU Libraries migrated DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository to a new home that is completely hosted and maintained by Florida State University. DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository  features FSU’s theses and dissertations, open access research and digitized archival collections. DigiNole is Florida State University’s unified platform for FSU-created and maintained digital resources providing access to a wide range of different materials in the Digital Library and Research Repository.

The transition between site hosts involved a complex, multi-layered process. This transition took two years to complete, beginning in the planning stages and ending at the time of public launch July 15, 2021. Users will notice better responsiveness to mobile devices, a more elegant interface, and better overall site performance. Users are also able to directly download video and audio files from records which is a functionality available in the new system.

Since the launch of the upgrade system on July 15, 2021, the Libraries’ internal Working Group began exploring new features such as a 3D object viewer and integrating ORCID as part of a new repository submission process. The internal group is also working on ADA compliant enhancements to ensure the accessibility for theses and dissertations. Additionally, audiovisual items will display closed captions streams.

FSU faculty, staff, students and postdocs are invited to submit research outputs such as articles, book chapters, reports, datasets, and posters to the Research Repository to make them publicly available at no cost to the author. Library workers are available to assist in compliance with copyright, publisher policies and the FSU Faculty Senate Open Access Policy.

The Research Repository is the platform for self-archiving published or pre-publication works for free public use. Authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (according to publisher policy) in an institutional archive such as DigiNole or a disciplinary repository such as arXiv.org. This is often referred to as “Green Open Access” and aligns with the FSU Faculty Senate Open Access Policy.

FSU students, researchers, and faculty wanting to submit their works to the Research Repository, this process is unaffected by the system changes. Users submit their works through the online submission form.

Our developers are leaders in contributing to the Islandora open source development community. For example, it is the first time ISLE (dockerized Islandora) has been deployed and hosted as a distributed deployment (multiple servers for different parts of the stack) in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment, featuring one of the biggest Solr search engine indexes in the digital repository community. The process included building and sustaining this technical infrastructure in a cloud-based computing environment (AWS), deploying an updated version of the repository’s software stack (Islandora) within this environment, and transferring the contents of the old repository to the new one in a way that maintains their integrity and discoverability.

For more information on the system migration, visit https://www.lib.fsu.edu/diginole/diginole-migration or please contact lib-support@fsu.edu with questions.