..Open source and digital education and learning, separately and together, aim to reach everyone. Although both movements have gained considerable maturity, a need for greater coordination exists..
PMB has most of the functional modules essential for a library management system including Circulation; Cataloguing; Reports; Selective Dissemination of Information Service; Administration and Acquisition. It has friendly web interfaces for librarian and users and supports UNIMARC and Z39.50 standards. Some other features include - Barcode Generator; Multi Language Support and Import and export of bibliographic records in different formats.
..The open source model offers librarians the capability to create the software that we’ve always wanted—-standards compliant[7], interoperable, extensible and scalable software that does what we want it to do: help customers find information quickly, conveniently, no matter where that information resides..I will say choose open source because it gives you the freedom to use, change or distribute the way you want. Remember, Libraries are expected to stay much longer than the vendors. Vendors may not support a version which they sold you some time ago. Or they may go out of business. In that case all your work and investment goes waste. You may be forced to migrate to another version or another software. With Open Source, you know what it all contains. You may tweak it yourself or hire people to do so, but then it is always with you. You can make it to evolve for your library's evolving needs.
..Open source software is quickly becoming a preferred solution, owing to the freedom to copy, modify and distribute it and the freedom from contracts, as well as for greater opportunities for interoperability with other applications..
According to data culled from ROAR in February 2008, number of repositories powered by various softwares / platforms are:
| Repository Software | No. of Repositories |
| DSpace | 271 |
| EPrints | 243 |
| Bepress | 58 |
| OPUS | 26 |
| ETD-db | 24 |
| DiVA | 16 |
| CDSWare | 9 |
| Fedora | 9 |
| Open Repository | 9 |
| HAL | 7 |
| ARNO | 5 |
| DoKs | 5 |
| Fez/Fedora | 4 |
| MyCoRe | 4 |
| SciX | 2 |
| OJS | 1 |
| Others | 300 |
DSpace and EPrints has majority of Installation base. 'bepress' stands for Berkeley Electronic Press which produces number of tools for content production and dissemination. Digital Commons is their hosted software / service for Institutional Repositories. The OPUS interfaces and documentation are primarily in German. ETD-db consists of a series of web pages and perl scripts that interact with a MySQL database. DiVA (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet in Swedish) is from universities of Scandinavia and developed at Uppsala University Library, Sweden. CDS Invenio (formerly CDSware) is unique in the sense that it uses MARC 21 as its underlying bibliographic standard. Latest version is CDS Invenio v0.92.1, released in February 2007. Fedora Commons provides sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content. Please do not confuse this with the RedHat supported linux project for community based development and distribution of Linux. Open Repository like 'bepress' is a service from BioMed Central which runs over DSpace. HAL is a repository platform rather instead of a software. ARNO Software is from ARNO project (Academic Research in the Netherlands Online) which aims to develop and implement university document servers to make available the scientific output of participating institutions. DoKS (Document and Knowledge Sharing application) is a digital library tool that makes it easy to publish, store, share and find documents online. The original focus of the project is the publication of ETDs from Flemish Institutes for Higher Education.It can be downloaded from sourceforge.net. Fez/Fedora a Web-based digital repository and workflow management software system based on Fedora 2.1 It is PHP and MySQL based and works as a front-end and administration tool. MyCoRe uses Java and XML/XSL technologies and supports various backend systems for management and querying of content. Apart from Open Source backends like MySQLand Apache Lucene it also supports commercial backend systems like Oracle, IBM DB2 and IBM Content Manager. SciX Open Publishing Services (SOPS) is software that allows setting up various on-line scientific publishing media. However the SciX Project has been completed in 2004. So not many new developments may be expected. OJS is actually a very good open source software for managing online publishing of scholarly journals. However from the above data table it has also been used for repository. The above table also shows that number of local softwares and systems have been developed for establishing institutional repositories.
The ultimate decision for selecting a repository software zeros down to DSpace and EPrints. Both are good candidates. EPrints uses PERL language and goes well with Standard LAMP configuration. DSpace is built on JAVA technology and runs on Tomcat. However internal a gateway can be established between Apache and Tomcat. In that case requests are handled by apache and processed by Tomcat internally.
