1. The trouble with a central repository, tempting as it is, is the issue of ongoing funding. Who pays for it? Where does it “live”? Who is responsible for it? In my experience the government have been willing to seed repositories, but don’t want permanent responsibility.

2. On the other hand, I think the government would be quite happy if more institutions got together and ran shared services, rather than everybody having their own repository. So there are some legs in Peter’s latter suggestion.

I am wondering if two things might happen:

1. Unis keep the local management part of their repository but let the outward facing OA stuff go and direct people to search in something like the NLA’s system or Google Scholar, as harvested from the discovery service.
2. Consortia might emerge where Unis share an IR, harmonize their metadata and their processes – this might be attractive to very small institutions.

I think the hard thing is that some repositories are now being used to meet very specific university-based needs – particularly reporting, but also around data. A centralised repository would make them less available as university management/reporting tools, as a long list of specific local requirements would get harder and harder to manage.

I don’t think it is a bad direction for repositories to become less about internal university needs, but some of the support from university managements seems to stem from their use as such.

But I’m not in the sector, so may not know what I am talking about

Concurring also with the frustration of getting even simple changes made to a commercial ILMS. Happily, on the repo end, we’re a Fez library, like Pete, and appreciate the flexibility of being able to make changes to the software as the need arises. It is so easy, that we are always trying to resist the tempation to make changes that are specific to ourselves, and hence going off on a tangent from the main Fez trunk. As for the support, UQ provides a great deal of informal support, but this isn’t something we should be relying on for the long term. Apart from UQ, I believe there is already a commercial firm called Catalyst which offers Fez support.

From the outside things could be better – such as pulling together wiki documentation into a nicer framework, regular release cycles, better support on mailing lists. Things would be different if Fez had a larger Australia Uni based though. Also UQ are UQ focused with developing the s/w primarily for their purposes – which is only natural plus they innovate way too fast – soem recent things include researcherID profiles and citation counts/cited by linking with Thomson, Scopus and Google Scholar.

I have some issues with LAMP software bundles but building on top of Fedora Commons is very forgiving and brings the best of web 2.0 innovation and software reliability together nicely. I certainly wouldn’t take Fez out of the mix. One day I’d like to see Fez evolve past being a LAMP bundle…

I’d love to collaborate to establish Fez migration pathways and in a way already have by adding CNRI Handle functionality to Fez.

And I highly rate Kettle/PDI for ETL (with ERA in mind) although this is a temp situation for us.