3   Example of Operation

To help illustrate the core business of an institutional repository, here is a minimalist example. Imagine a Faculty of Arts that has moved to a digital solution—couched as an institutional repository—that replaces the physical photographic color slide resource that the Faculty previously provided.

Figure 1 shows the submission process, which has in fact been developed using the newly extended version of Greenstone. A single page is used to gather salient facts before an item is deposited. Only four items of metadata are requested along with a picture of the artwork: title, artist, date and notes. A real-world version would most likely request many more fields than this.

To reach this page the user has already had to log in. In Figure 1a she is selecting the destination collection (the Art History repository). In the next step (Figure 1b) she has used the file browser that is launched by pressing the “Browse …” button to locate the artwork to submit, and entered metadata describing the items (Title: The Bower Meadow; Artist: Rossetti; Date: 1871–1872) along with notes about the painting. Along the bottom is a progress bar with a triangular marker showing the current position (“specify metadata”).

Clicking on “deposit item” takes her to the next step (Figure 1c) where the new information is digested into the collection, which occurs in a matter of seconds. The final step is to view the collection, which is shown in Figure 1d where the user is browsing the Art History Repository by title. The repository is clearly in its early stages with only three items added so far, with the newest addition, The Bower Meadow, listed at the top.