Emeryville, CA—Innovative Interfaces announced today its plans to offer a full-featured institutional repository system. Called Symposia, this Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant solution provides all that a community needs to collect, manage, and promote its knowledge assets more effectively than ever before. "Institutional repositories offer libraries an opportunity to lead their communities in yet one more critical area," says Innovative's Chairman and CEO Jerry Kline. "Librarians are ideally positioned to create and maintain repositories and we are actively working with libraries to ensure that Symposia meets their needs in this exciting new arena."
Innovative's institutional repository initiative began in 2004. As with all Innovative products, Symposia was developed with direct input from libraries themselves. Development partner Northeastern University Libraries is currently using Symposia to build its digital institutional repository, IRis.
Innovative's product will support content creators, such as academic faculty or public officials that desire to or are mandated to make their work available to the widest group possible. It will also help library professionals embrace a new opportunity for community engagement. Symposia is designed specifically for users involved in day-to-day knowledge management—the actual creators, managers and consumers of this content—rather than exclusively for IT specialists. Content creators will find that Symposia allows them to submit both "born-digital" and converted documents such as word-processing files, scans, image files, webpages, and more to the repository with the same ease as sending email. Librarians can expect the same ease-of-use and elegant design that is the hallmark of Millennium, Innovative's library management system.
Users of Symposia will be able to create communities in cyberspace that closely mirror the departments, committees, and outreach partnerships to which they belong. While other solutions limit the depth of the community hierarchy, or don't allow hierarchical organization, Innovative's institutional repository enables virtually unlimited local groups to create their own spaces in the repository. For example, a physics department could set up areas for department-wide activities as well as groups devoted to astrophysics, particle physics, and so on. What's more, each of these groups can establish its own levels of permissions for participating contributors or library staff members.
Symposia will include an efficient form for Web-based submission of material and an elegant searching tool for public access. Library staff will benefit from a Java™-based client for effective management of repository metadata. Metadata will be stored in XML and will be made available for harvesting via the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting as a data provider. This will facilitate indexing by search engine crawlers and harvesting by other information managers worldwide. The repository will also harness other established and sophisticated metadata schema: Qualified Dublin Core and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard).
About Innovative
With over 25 years of partnership with the library community, Innovative Interfaces (www.iii.com) is the leader in providing Web-powered, Java-based integrated library management systems. Its flagship product offering, Millennium, is an acknowledged market leader installed in thousands of libraries in 42 countries. The company is headquartered in Emeryville, California, with offices around the world.
