This research “Customization of DSpace for managing Multimedia Institutional Repository: The case of UNECA” focuses on identifying a proper metadata standard for multimedia items representation and a customization work on open source Institutional Repository software called DSpace for proper handling of multimedia items. The identified metadata standard helps for proper preservation and ease of access of multimedia items. This multimedia metadata standard is an extension of Dublin Core metadata standard, but it suitably customized to multimedia item management.
The core DSpace module can accept the multimedia items, but the representation of multimedia items on DSpace are the same that of pdf or any other word processing documents. It uploads the items and creates a link for downloading option. Any users on the repository can see the link to download the items on the repository. Due to the nature of the file, multimedia items should not be treated as a text file document, all uploaded items on the repository should be handled based on the item type. One of the main accomplishments of this research is customizing DSpace for the proper handling of multimedia items. The customized MIR application handles the multimedia items based on the item file type. If the item is image, it displays the image (the default DSpace option is creating a link to download image). If the item is audio/video, the system displays an audio/video player and the user can listen/view live without downloading the audio/video.
Based on the conducted user acceptance testing the users strongly agreed that MIR is beneficial to them and the customized prototype application is user friendly so that they can navigate on the application and access multimedia items easily.
The identified multimedia metadata enables the users to have a good idea of the item before actually downloading it. This proves useful in situations where accessing the item is costly. For example, let the item that we want to access be a video of several gigabytes, and after downloading it from the Internet we learn that it is not the video that we wanted. Here, we wasted a considerable amount of bandwidth for downloading the wrong content. But, if we first consulted the metadata of the video, we could have learnt that it is not what we wanted, with a much lesser wastage of bandwidth. But on MIR user can get a detail information about each multimedia items on the metadata description and have a preview of the item without downloading it. A detailed research is done on the area of multimedia, metadata standards, and institutional repository. The customized prototype of MIR is done by customizing DSpace. The customization is mainly done by implementing the identified metadata standard and program