UNESCO Publishes Guidelines to Compare Institutional Repository Software

From a UNESCO Announcement (2/17/2014):

The Guidelines to compare Institutional Repository Software is being published as part of the UNESCO’s Open Access Strategy. It compares the features of the major platforms and is intended to help libraries focus on which features will help facilitate the success of their repository.
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Institutional Repositories (IRs) were first developed as an online solution for collecting, preserving, and disseminating the scholarship of universities, colleges, and other research institutions. Since 2000, a number of repository platforms have been developed, each with their own set of benefits and technical criteria. All of these put libraries exploring IRs for the first time in an enviable position.
The products have richer feature sets, and all the major platforms are available as a hosted service, which arguably has a lower total cost of ownership and is less time-consuming than running an IR locally. Librarians are now truly free to compare platforms by focusing on the critical features that will address their needs and make their repositories successful.
Jean-Gabriel Bankier and Kenneth Gleason of the bepress contributed to the development of the text. Devika Madalli also contributed to the drafting of the text.

Read the Complete Announcement
The full text document (16 pages) can be accessed on the UNESCO web site. We’ve also embedded a copy of the full text below.

UNESCO Institutional Repository Software Comparison (Guidelines)

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