Not Entirely Unlike - CRIS Integration With Fedora

Since 2009, Symplectic has been integrating its flagship research management system, Elements, with institutional repositories. In almost all cases, the repository has been either DSpace or EPrints.

Historically, neither of these platforms provided an API suitable for such integration; but despite institutional requirements varying, the architecture of these platforms have made it possible to write extensions to enable integration, with relatively few configurable parts to match each implementation.

In 2014, we took on the challenge of implementing integrations for four clients using repositories built with Fedora. Each of these had different user and administrative interfaces - from custom built, through well known platforms like Fez, Primo and VITAL.

Whilst Fedora provides a consistent API that can be used to create and modify the repository contents, the flexibility provided by Fedora meant significant differences existed for each integration:

type of metadata documents (DC vs MARC vs MODS)

use of identifiers and object and datastream fields

order and number of API calls

This poster showcases our solutions to these difficulties, which delivered successful integrations to all four institutions.