CSpace – A More Practical and Customizable Repository Platform Serving Local Needs

CAS IR Grid [1] is an overarching repository infrastructure that connects the institutional repositories (IR) of member institutes throughout Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It aims to advance scholarship and promote research infrastructure development within but not limited to the scope of CAS. The primary goals are to first establish sustainable IRs in most institutes as a practical and strategic means for them to build partnerships with their researchers to ensure capture, preservation, and the widest possible sharing of all types of their research outputs and; then, these IRs should gradually grow to be essential and embedded infrastructures in research environment, upon which overlay services can build and layer. In support of its construction and helping achieve above goals, the software toolkit CSpace is developed based on popular OSS DSpace package [2] and was officially open sourced in October last year. With successive customization and extension by modifying existing, or adding new components or modules, it offers functionalities and services that are more practical and well fitting for Chinese language settings and responds to constantly expanding local needs and concerns. Moreover, facing the evolving context of digital content in research environment, CSpace allows for creating or tailoring content type aware templates and associated rules in a non-programmable way, to adapt them to different and changing needs of content management. A range of other useful customization options are also available to enable that it to be easily deployed within certain local settings as well.