History of the Newly Updated UTA ResearchCommons

UTA ResearchCommons (RC) is the University of Texas at Arlington’s institutional repository. The RC provides open access to scholarship and research output produced by the UTA community. The RC now has a new face!

The RC is based on the DSpace system. The DSpace system is a widely used open source repository software package for published digital content. 

The original DSpace instance was launched in 2007. UTA Libraries operated a DSpace server in the Libraries before the university implemented the server management policy which required all departmental servers be moved to the Office of Information Technology (OIT). Then we migrated the DSpace service to OIT where it lived for a number of years. However, our DSpace version was becoming dated and we could not convince OIT to upgrade to a current version, nor give Libraries’ staff authorization to do the upgrade ourselves.

UTA Libraries is a member of Texas Digital Library (TDL). The decision was made to transfer the DSpace service to the TDL group in Austin. TDL also was operating a number of open source applications as services to libraries throughout the state. For example, Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Conference Systems (OCS) were two of them. OJS is currently used for our OA journals, but OCS was sunsetted in 2014 or 2015.

However, UTA Libraries got to a point where we needed functionality that TDL could not provide.  At about the same time, we were beginning to experiment with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for server hosting. We had considerable backing from the Information Security Office in our work with AWS, along with nominal support from OIT. The decision was made to migrate DSpace from TDL to AWS where we had complete control of system functionality and upgrade capabilities.

In 2015, Glenn Goodspeed joined UTA Libraries as the Linux Systems Administrator and the lead in establishing our AWS service and working with TDL to migrate DSpace data. Glenn was in charge of the RC migration from TDL to UTA. After several months of planning, it was fully migrated from TDL to our DSpace installation in July 2018. Glenn said, “It was difficult to manage all the details, but the concept was fairly simple. TDL ran the server on an instance in AWS. TDL made a copy of it available to us, and we moved the copy into our space in AWS. It took a few weeks to work out the details, and then TDL began forwarding browsers to our server instead of theirs.”

The name “ResearchCommons” came from a university committee which consisted of the OIT members and UTA Libraries. They went through a process to get the name selected.