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Neil Godfrey recently posted an "INFORMAL Comparison of some institutional repository solutions" that anyone trying to make a platform decision may find useful. You will no doubt need to go much deeper before making a final decision, but at least this may serve as a good summary introduction to what each platform provides.

Also keep in mind that the landscape can be slightly more complicated than depicted here. For example, with the Digital Commons solution from bepress.com, you can easily add a full-featured peer review publication system to your institutional repository. This is something you cannot do with many other IR solutions, including the popular DSpace platform. This distinction is not covered in Godfrey's informal review. But overall it isn't a bad place to start in getting to know the various solutions.

I saw a note come through recently about a server that the University of Cincinnati Libraries had set up to be a "sandbox". What this means is that it is a place where new software (particularly open source software) can be installed for staff to investigate.

The sole admonition is to "Play nice together" and it currently has such applications as Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, phpWiki, Tiki, and Moodle installed, among others.

I think this ia a wonderful idea and I'm glad to see that the University of Cincinnati Libraries takes their responsibility to help its staff learn new technologies seriously. I wish that more of our institutions did so.

In a soon-to-appear Library Journal column, I discuss strategies for an uncertain future. One of those strategies is the topic of this blog posting, since I wanted to both throw this out there for discussion as well as to discuss it more thoroughly than I can in an 800-word column.

As anticipated, earlier this week the International Standards Organization approved the OpenDocument Format for retrieving and exchanging documents. The impetus to move to an open standard has come from governments, archivists, and librarians concerned about the storage and use of longtime proprietary document file formats such as MS Office documents and pdf files.