Development status Active Operating system | Written in PHP, XSLT, JavaScript | |
Developer(s) Cooperative Library Network of Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV) Stable release 4.4.5 / 30 October 2014; 2 years ago (2014-10-30) Type Institutional repository software | ||
OPUS is an open source software package under the GNU General Public License used for creating Open Access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It provides tools for creating collections of digital resources, as well as for their storage and dissemination. It is usually used at universities, libraries and research institutes as a platform for institutional repositories.
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History
OPUS, originally an acronym for the Online Publikationsverbund der Universität Stuttgart, was developed with the support of the Deutsches Forschungsnetz in 1997 and 1998 at the University of Stuttgart. OPUS is used at many universities and library networks. Since December 2010, the Cooperative Library Network of Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV) took over the development and management of the project at the Zuse Institute in Berlin. In Germany, the OPUS software is the most commonly used for the operation of open access repositories (according to a survey carried out in 2012, 77 repositories were based on OPUS). OPUS-based repositories may either be hosted and operated by universities on their own, or as part of hosting services provided by the German library network. The KOBV provides hosting for more than 35 instances of OPUS. Apart from Germany, OPUS is also used in Serbia by two research institutes.
Development
The current version, OPUS 4, is being developed by the Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg at the Zuse Institute Berlin.
The earlier development was coordinated by the Library Service Centre for Baden-Württemberg and the Stuttgart University Library. Major partners have included the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB), Bielefeld University Library, Saarland University and State Library Saarbrücken (SULB), University Library of the Technical University of Hamburg, Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV) and University Library Centre of North Rhine-Westphalia (HBZ).
Technology
OPUS 3.x was written in PHP 4. The current version, OPUS 4, is developed in PHP (version 5.3) and is based on the Zend Framework and the search engine Solr. Data are stored in a MySQL database. Both versions are designed for LAMP environments.