Our poster will inform attendees about the Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (MD-SOAR), a shared digital repository platform for participating colleges and universities in Maryland. MD-SOAR, newly emerged from its pilot phase, is now accepting new institutions. Any college or university in Maryland can join MD-SOAR and enjoy the benefits of having access to a fully-fledged institutional repository, as well as maintenance and development, at a fraction of the normal cost.

MD-SOAR currently is funded entirely by the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) Library Consortium (usmai.org) but also includes other collaborating partner institutions. MD-SOAR is jointly governed by all participating libraries, who have agreed to share policies and practices that are necessary and appropriate for the shared platform. After evaluating various vendors and platforms, the MD-SOAR governance group selected DSpace (http://www.dspace.org/) as their platform with University of Maryland, College Park’s Digital Systems and Stewardship Division (DSS), as their vendor. DSS already had experience managing a successful DSpace repository, DRUM (Digital Repository at the University of Maryland, http://drum.lib.umd.edu/). The MD-SOAR governance group and DSS collaborate on specific customizations, e.g. submission forms and metadata, for MD-SOAR. Customizations and other application updates are tested on an instance of MD-SOAR on a development server before they are installed in MD-SOAR.

In addition to providing a general overview of the governance group’s process for the establishment and ongoing support of the MD-SOAR platform, this poster will illustrate the metadata framework developed to support a wide variety of file types across a distributed consortial user base. Furthermore, the poster will cover ongoing development efforts that will support continued platform usability and sustainability. Lastly, this poster will illustrate MD-SOAR’s partnership in research initiatives at external institutions, underscoring the platform’s importance not only as an innovative repository approach but also as a testing ground for experimental analytics methodologies. The presenters will serve as MD-SOAR representatives and will have information on hand for institutions that may be interested in joining the MD-SOAR community.