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Design and Development of a Web Based Digital Repository for Scholarly

Communication: A Case of NM-AIST Tanzania

Article in INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE CONTENT DEVELOPMENT & TECHNOLOGY · December 2014
DOI: 10.5865/IJKCT.2014.4.2.097

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International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology Vol.4, No.2, 97-108 (December, 2014) 97

Design and Development of a Web Based Digital Repository for

Scholarly Communication: A Case of NM‐AIST Tanzania
Wasiwasi J. Mgonzo*, Zaipuna O. Yonah***

A R T IC L E IN F O ABSTRACT

Article history: Institutional repositories are essential research infrastructures for research
Received 23 September 2014 ‐based universities. A properly dimensioned institutional repository has
Revised 24 November 2014 the potential to increase research impact and enhance the visibility of
Accepted 01 Desember 2014 an institution through its scholarly outputs. The aim of the study reported
in this paper was to design and develop a web‐based digital repository
Keywords: for scholarly communications using NM‐AIST as a case study. The
Institutional Repositories, system was developed using open source software. Findings obtained
Research Infrastructure, from system validation tests show that the system is a viable solution
Scholarly Communications, to the major challenges encountered in the management and sharing
Web‐based, of scholarly information at the institution.
Open Source Software

1. Introduction

An institutional repository (IR) is a system that collects, preserves, manages, and provides access
to intellectual products of a community (Hockx, 2006). Institutional intellectual products may include
faculty work, student theses and dissertations, e‐journals, datasets, and so on. IRs provide a mechanism
for an institution to showcase its scholarly output, centralize and introduce efficiencies to the stewardship
of digital documents of value, and respond proactively to the escalating crisis in scholarly communica-
tion (Gibbons, 2004). The availability of open‐source repository systems has encouraged and led
to the proliferation of IRs worldwide, particularly among academic and research institutions. The
following are the benefits behind establishing IRs:

ⅰ. Providing open access to research outputs of institutions to a worldwide audience both within
and outside the institution;
ⅱ. Maximizing the impact and enhancing the visibility of the scholarly works produced at the institution;
ⅲ. And managing and measuring the impacts of institutional research and teaching activities;

The growing trend towards online scholarly communication and lack of scholarly content manage-
ment systems among universities has made digital repositories more important for the collection

* The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (mgonzow@nm‐aist.ac.tz)

** The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (zaipuna.yonah@nm‐aist.ac.tz)
International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology, 4(2): 97-108, 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5865/IJKCT.2014.4.2.097
 W. J. Mgonzo & Z. O. Yonah
98 International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology Vol.4, No.2, 97-108 (December, 2014)

and distribution of scholarly materials (Budapest, 2002; Chan, 2004; Lynch, 2005). Today, digital
repositories are used at academic institutions to store and disseminate scholarly outputs of uni-
versities (Lynch and Lippincott, 2005).
In the beginning, repository systems were developed as a hosted online solution for collecting,
preserving, and disseminating scholarship of universities, colleges, and other research institutions.
Recently, software have been developed and repositories have evolved into a publication platform
for institutions to showcase their scholarship including articles, books, theses, dissertations, and
journals. The number of repository platforms has also increased, and the choice of which to use
depends on benefits and technical criteria (Bankier, 2014).
The idea behind establishment of repository software platforms was that the software be open
source and locally installed. This approach offered unlimited flexibility for developers to customize
them, which made interoperability a problem. The platforms have now been enhanced to include
features that require no extra customization. Potential high maintenance costs also led many institutions
to move to open source software.
Today, institutional repository platforms have richer feature sets never witnessed before. The
software are openly available and have a wider support from the global community of developers.
Universities are free to compare different platforms depending on the features that best address
their needs and that would make their repositories more successful (Armbruster and Romary, 2009).
Generally, an institutional repository centralizes, preserves, and makes accessible the scholarly works
generated by academic institutions, and form part of a larger global system of repositories which
are indexed in a standardized way and searchable using a common interface (Sefton, 2009).
While reviewing the status of open access repositories in Tanzania, Mgonzo and Zaipuna (2014)
reported that attitudes and web usage behaviour of users have an impact on the performance of
IRs. In a related work, lack of resource sharing policy and lack of proper digital asset management
systems have been pointed out as the major factors that hinder the adoption of open access repositories
in Tanzania (Mgonzo and Zaipuna, 2014). As a response to these challenges, this paper presents
the design and implementation of DSpace@NM‐AIST, a web‐based digital repository for scholarly
communication proposed for The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology
(NM‐AIST). The system is implemented using DSpace repository software. It is not the intention
of this paper to show how well the design of the proposed system is, but how well it addresses
the challenges identified and how usage behaviour affects its success.
The paper is organised into seven sections. An overview of the Dspace Repository System is
given in Section 2. Section 3 covers Materials and Methods, Section 4 presents the results, Section
5 presents System Design, Section 6 covers System Implementation, and Section 7 has the Conclusion
and Recommendations.

2. Overview of DSpace Repository System

DSpace is an open source repository development software typically used for creating open access
repositories for scholarly and published digital content. A repository is a system for delivering
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International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology Vol.4, No.2, 97-108 (December, 2014) 99

digital content to end‐users. Global statistics show that, DSpace is the most widely used open source
repository software for institutional and open access repositories. High use of the software has
been observed in universities and research‐based institutions as a way to provide access to research
output, scholarly publications, and more (Smith et al., 2003). Usage Statistics show that out of 2792
repositories worldwide, 1159 (42%) are using Dspace software (OpenDOAR, 2014). This is the
main reason why Dspace software was chosen to implement Dspace@NM‐AIST. Also the suitability
for a stable repository system is another factor that favoured its choice (Lewis et al., 2012).
DSpace supports Qualified Dublin Core metadata by default and is oriented towards open standards
and protocols, and therefore, fully supports the Open Archive Initiative for Metadata Harvesting
Protocol (OAI‐PMH). The search engine is based on Lucene, a popular and powerful open‐source
engine. In fact, the DSpace software has proven to be a solid repository platform since its launch.
That is why it remains promising and competitive amidst other software platforms, like its follower
Eprints which currently has 381 (14%) repositories out of 2792 worldwide (OpenDOAR, 2014).
Content in DSpace is at the highest level organized into communities. At an institutional level,
communities could be departments, labs, research centers, or schools. Communities, in turn, each
have collections that contain logically‐related material, the items or files. For example, a technical
report series might be a collection, which contains items, a grouping of content and metadata that
users access as scholarly materials. Items may take the form of a research article, theses or dissertations,
or a technical report together with a dataset used in experiments described by the report. Communities
and Collections are used within DSpace to provide the repository with an easy to navigate structure
often representing an institution’s organizational makeup.
The Dspace repository architecture follows a three‐layer model, which is composed of the presentation
layer, a repository management layer, and a storage layer (Gao and Krogstie, 2010). The storage
layer consists of a relational database for storing metadata and a bitstream storage module for
storing content data. The repository management layer contains the modules that perform the business
logic of the system. The presentation layer of the Dspace platform is the services layer representing
the Web user interface (Bass et al., 2002). Figure 1 illustrates the Dspace system architecture.

Fig. 1. DSpace system architecture [Adopted from DSpace, 2009]

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3. Materials and Methods

This section describes the study methodology and materials used. A case study approach was
adopted. A comparative survey of repository software was undertaken to select the best repository
software to use. Data used in the survey were collected from the Directory of Open Access Repositories
(OpenDOAR). Visual Paradigm for UML software was used to describe the system overview through
DFDs. Several supporting open source software were chosen and integrated in the repository system.
These include apache Tomcat, apache ant, apache maven, PostgreSQL relational database, and Java
Development Kit (JDK).

4. Results

In choosing the best software to implement the repository system at NM‐AIST, various literature
were consulted. Findings in Bankier (2014) and Armbruster and Romary (2009) reports high usage
of DSpace followed by Eprints which is next to DSpace in popularity although it is not as widely
used as DSpace. Results from the survey conducted revealed that out of 2729 repositories worldwide,
Dspace has the highest usage (42.3%) followed by EPrints (14.0%). The results are summarized
in Table 1.

Table 1. Distribution of Repository Software among repositories worldwide

S/N Software Name Number of Repositories Percentage

1. DSpace 1159 42.3%
2. Eprints 381 14.0%
3. Digital Commons 127 5.0%
4. dLibra 60 2.2%
5. Greenstone 53 1.9%
6. CONTENTdm 50 1.8%
7. HTML 39 1.4%
8. Fedora 34 1.2%
9. Diva‐Portal 32 1.1%
10. Open Repository 24 0.9%
11. Others 770 28.2%
TOTAL (N) 2729 100%
Source: OpenDOAR 2014

5. System Design

A system design should specify in detail how the parts of an information system should be
implemented. For the case of Dspace@NM‐AIST, dataflow diagrams (DFD) were used in the design
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International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology Vol.4, No.2, 97-108 (December, 2014) 101

part. DFDs are one of the main methods for analyzing data oriented systems because they emphasize
the logic underlying the system. DFDs are common tools for structuring information (Valacich
et al., 2012). They generally illustrate how data is processed by a system in terms of inputs and
outputs, and are used to create an overview of the system and can be also used for visualization
of data processing. There are two common notations available for representing DFDs. These are
the Gene‐Sarson notations and the Yourdon & Coad notations. In this paper, Gane‐Sarson diagram
notations are adopted. Gane‐Sarson diagrams show the storage, exchange, and alteration of data
and resources throughout the diagram, which is a capability that many other diagrams do not possess.
Figure 2 shows the DFD components.

Fig. 2. DFD Components

Processes represent either a whole system, a sub‐system, or work being done (activity). External
entities represent people or organizations outside the entire system or sub‐system, and usually show
the initial source and final recipient of data and information. Data stores represent data stores such
as computer files or database transaction files, set of tables or manual files or records. Data flows
shows data movement through the system. The data could be about a person, place, or thing. Arrowheads
are used to represent the direction of movement of data. Double arrowheads are used when a process
both reads and updates data on the same table or file. The Data Flow Diagrams are usually built
in layers. The top is called context or level 0 DFD. Subsequent diagrams are named DFD 1, 2,
3 and so on and are usually a result of exploring the context diagram process or other lower level
processes to provide for more detailed analysis of the system and data flow between entities, processes,
and data stores.
A context diagram is a top level (also known as Level 0) data flow diagram. It only contains
one process node (process 0) that generalizes the function of the entire system in relationship to
external entities. The diagram does not contain any data store. Context diagram 1 is the breakdown
of the level 0 diagram, and may include up to 9 processes and the major data stores and external
entities. Each process on context diagram 1 can be broken down to create a child diagram and
subsequent child diagrams thereafter.
In the proposed DSpace@NM‐AIST system, three possible users were identified, and these act
as information sources or final recipients of data and information. They interact with the system
with various roles namely, administrator: a person assigned system administration roles to control
and monitor users and content submitted into the repository; authors: include faculty, students,
and researchers who interact with the system when they submit their scholarly materials into the
repository; and viewers: all persons who visit the repository for reading the contents. Level 0 diagram
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102 International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology Vol.4, No.2, 97-108 (December, 2014)

(context level) in Fig. 3 gives a general system overview. It shows the main external entities and
how information flows between these entities and the system.

Fig. 3. DFD Level 0 diagram

The outcome of expanding the level 0 diagram is level 1 diagram as shown in Fig. 4. The diagram
breaks down the context diagram and shows four main processes of the system. These are: Item
submission, Manage submissions, Submission acknowledgement and view content process.

Fig. 4. DFD level 1 diagram

The outcome of breaking down the level 1 diagram is level 2 diagram as shown in Fig. 5.
The diagram expands on the level 1 diagram and shows sub‐processes of the main processes of
the system. These are: create account, verify e‐mail, create profile, submit item and acknowledge
submission sub processes for the author functionalities; accept item and commit archival for the
administrator functionalities and view content for the viewer functionalities.
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International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology Vol.4, No.2, 97-108 (December, 2014) 103

Fig. 5. DFD level 2 diagram

6. System Implementation

In practice, system implementation is a process of assuring that the designed system is built and
made operational. In our case, it is a software development or assembling step that implements
previously created system design. By default, DSpace installs with other supporting software. To
build up the NM‐AIST repository system prototype, the following supporting software were used:

a. Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlets which helps to
create a Web server;
b. Apache Ant is a Java‐based build tool;
c. Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. It can manage a project’s
build, reporting, and documentation from a central piece of information.
d. PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object relational database system. It is used for storing
the database of our repository.
e. JDK is a development environment for building applications, applets, and components using the
Java programming language.
f. DSpace is an open‐source digital asset management software.

6.1. DSpace@NM‐AIST Repository Structure

The Dspace@NM‐AIST repository has been implemented with six communities. In this case, schools
are treated as communities and departments as collections. Item types specify different subjects
under a department where authors can deposit their scholarly works (items). In general, the hierarchy
is Community/Sub‐community/collections/Items. Table 2 summarizes the structure. The same is re-
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flected in Fig. 6 which show the communities and Fig. 7 which show communities and their collections.

Table 2. DSpace@NM‐AIST structure

S/N Community Sub‐community Collections Items
1. MaSE Department None Item type Items
2. BuSH school None Item type Items
3. CoCSE school ETE Department Item type Items
ITSDM Department Item type Items
MCSE Department Item type Items
4. EaSEn school None Item type Items
5. LiSBE school None Item type Items
6. MEWES school None Item type Items

Fig. 6. Communities in DSpace@NM‐AIST repository

Fig. 7. Communities and collections in DSpace@NM‐AIST repository

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International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology Vol.4, No.2, 97-108 (December, 2014) 105

6.2. Content Submission Workflow

The submission workflow describes the process through which content is created, reviewed for
quality control, uploaded into the system, and finally archived. In the first part, the work is done
manually because the system cannot handle quality control functionalities. Figure 8 shows the proposed
content submission workflow for NM‐AIST. Authors are then required to follow the online steps
to submit the item into the institution repository which then archives the item. Figure 9 shows
the DSpace@NM‐AIST item submission process.

Fig. 8. Proposed content submission workflow

Fig. 9. Item submission workflow

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6.3. Sample submitted items

Since the system is an open access repository, submitted items can be shown in the system
and viewers are given access and distribution permissions to read, download, and redistribute them.
Figure 10 below shows the list of submitted items and Fig. 11 shows a sample of submitted
documents.

Fig. 10. Submitted items records

Fig. 11. Sample submitted item

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International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology Vol.4, No.2, 97-108 (December, 2014) 107

7. Discussion and Recommendations

In this paper, authors report on work done to develop a DSpace@NM‐AIST repository system,
which will be used as a platform for collecting, preserving, and sharing scholarly research outputs
at The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM‐AIST) as a case study.
The development of the system is based on the need for such a system as a solution for the challenges
faced by faculty and students in the collection and dissemination of research materials. The work
presented here is a continuation of a previous work by the same authors that studied the attitudes
and web‐usage behaviour of users and how these affect the implementation and future success
of these systems which are purely web‐based.
The Dspace@NM‐AIST has been implemented using open source DSpace repository software.
There are several advantages behind open and free source software. One is overcoming the financial
constraints most organizations face in implementing similar systems. The other major advantage
is the continued support and improvement that open source software benefits from the global community
of software developers. Therefore the Dspace@NM‐AIST repository is suitable.
The Dspace@NM‐AIST system is also capable to benefit the institution in many other ways. For
example, it can be used as a tool to monitor and assess the number and quality of research outputs
of the institution. By doing so, the value of money invested in research and educational activities
can be evaluated based on this fact. The system also can be a platform for new knowledge discovery
which can create innovations that solve other similar challenging problems.
Based on the experience from the reported study, it is recommended that the system be evaluated
in the future, say in 5 years, to assess its success in terms of content recruitment and in terms of
the promised functionalities such as management, resource sharing and preservation, and alternative
publishing platform.

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology
(NM‐AIST) specifically the school of Computation and Communication Science and Engineering
(CoCSE) for the support that made this work a success.

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