Status update on developments in the Digital Repository of Ireland, presented at Hydra Connect 2016 in Boston

1. The Digital Repository of Ireland Kathryn Cassidy (kcassidy@tchpc.tcd.ie), Dermot Frost (dfrost@tchpc.tcd.ie), Stuart Kenny (skenny@tchpc.tcd.ie), Trinity College Dublin
Investing in your future
The Digital Repository of Ireland is an interac6ve, trusted digital repository for social
and cultural content held by Irish ins6tu6ons. The Repository was officially launched
on 25th June 2015 along with a report en6tled "Building the Digital Repository of
Ireland Infrastructure".
The repository is made up of a Hydra Head with Hydra 9 and Fedora 4 and all
services run within a virtualised environment.
With a dual remit to serve the Humani6es and Social Science domains, the
Repository must support a range of metadata and data formats.
Digital objects can be described in any of the supported metadata standards: Dublin
Core (Simple & Qualified), EAD, MARC or MODS. The repository also supports both
XML and RDF objects, depending on the object type.
Various data types are also supported, these include digi6sed images of artworks
and manuscripts, audio and video materials from archives and broadcasters, as well
as Social Sciences research data.
Download the DRI
Infrastructure Report at
hp://6ny.cc/dri-infra
Access the DRI Repository
at hps://repository.dri.ie/
The DRI was established in 2011, when it received funding from the Irish
Government’s PRTLI cycle 5 for €5.2M over four years. The DRI consor6um is
comprised of the following partners: The Royal Irish Academy (Lead Ins6tu6on),
Maynooth University (MU), Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Dublin Ins6tute of
Technology (DIT), Na6onal University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), and Na6onal
College of Art and Design (NCAD). The DRI is currently collabora6ng with a network
of cultural, social, academic and industry partners, including the Na6onal Library of
Ireland (NLI) and the Irish Na6onal Broadcaster RTÉ.
The DRI Repository
About the DRI
The DRI Infrastructure Report
Features and Work In Progress
The Digital Repository has published a report on the design and development of the
Repository Infrastructure en6tled “Building the Digital Repository of Ireland
Infrastructure”. The report is available for download from the Digital Repository of
Ireland website.
The report outlines the process in planning, designing and developing the Repository,
as well as some of the technology choices that were made. The architecture of the
repository is also fully described in the report.
This is part of the Digital Repository of Ireland’s commitment to open access, not only
for the objects stored within our repository, but also in rela6on to the work carried
out by the project.
Shibboleth authen>ca>on allows users to log in to the Repository using creden6als
provided by their own ins6tu6on. This has been enabled in the Repository by
integra6ng with Edugate, a federated access service provided by HEAnet, Ireland’s
research and educa6on network.
All published collec6ons and objects in the Repository are automa6cally assigned
Digital Object Iden>fiers (DOI) that are included in the cita6on. DOIs are minted
with DataCite by using their provided REST API.
The Repository supports batch ingest of large collec6ons through a command-line
tool and REST API. We are also currently trialing a web-based solu>on using an
Avalon-style ingest manifest.
We will soon be adding IIIF Image API and Presenta6on API support to the
Repository using the Riiif Rails engine and Mirador viewer.
We will also be migra6ng the Repository’s preserva>on storage to use a “Moab”
versioning strategy as developed by Stanford Digital Repository. Moab facilitates
the efficient versioning of digital objects without introducing unnecessary
duplica6on of files or data. DRI will be using the Stanford developed “moab-
versioning” Ruby Gem to implement the strategy within the Repository.
Deployment
Test Training Produc6on
OpenNebula OpenNebula
Site B (MU) Site A (TCD)
Con6nuous
Integra6on Server
Ansible
Deployment Host
Ansible
Automa6c
deploy on
successful
build
Manual
deploy
DRI maintain three instances of the Repository across two sites. Test and training
instances are hosted at Maynooth University and the produc6on instance at Trinity
College Dublin. All three instances are virtualised running on OpenNebula private
clouds. The OpenNebula clouds are backed by Ceph distributed storage.
C e p h ’ s d i s t r i b u t e d ,
clustered architecture
provides data security and
high availability, with
many interface op6ons.
Replica6ng the infrastructure is achieved through the use of a set of Ansible
deployment scripts. The test instance is deployed as the final step in our con6nuous
integra6on build process. This allows us to verify changes in a produc6on
environment before deploying to the live system. The same Ansible scripts are used
to deploy to the produc6on instance as a manual process executed by an
administrator.
DRI provides training courses to users and a separate training instance is maintained
for this purpose. Managing this replica6on of services with a small team is only
possible through extensive use of automa6on and virtualisa6on.