Wednesday, October 13, 2010

EPrints is bringing up the rear...

I didn't care much for DSpace during the first week, but by the second week I had warmed up to it. EPrints is running a similar deficit right off the bat, and I'm not sure it'll catch up. The installation itself went fairly smoothly - I rarely have installation problems. But the customization appears to require quite a bit of command line tinkering which isn't my preference. For instance, the subjects2.txt file appears to be the only way to change subject headings from LOC, whereas I much prefer editing them in a GUI like in Drupal. Additionally, customization of the home page comment line was accomplished only through the command line, which isn't necessarily a problem (I got it to work), but isn't my first choice. This is probably just an issue of confidence and practice, which could be overcome with time and EPrints experience. Nonetheless, it looks like EPrints offers less robust customization when compared against the range of options provided by Drupal.

This week I "branded" the home page by editing the command line to include a short sentence describing my collection. I'm still working to edit the subject headings. My collection is entirely images, which doesn't seem to be the primary format used by most EPrints repositories. From what I've seen, EPrints caters more toward the theses/papers/text crowd. In fact, the primary audience seems to be institutions seeking a CMS for digital preservation of research papers. At this point, I think Drupal or DSpace would be better choices for housing my collection than EPrints.

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