Unit 11 Comparison of Home Sites

I’m not quite sure if this week’s blog assignment is to discuss the home site of the repository we were created using Drupal, DSpace, ePrints and Omeka, or the respective organizations’ home site.


Of the organizations’ home sites, I must admit I found Drupal’s marketing line the most compelling: Come for the software, stay for the community. It emphasizes that a novice repository developer would not be alone, but has a great deal of global support. Let’s make that an exceptional amount of company and support: “701,691 people in 228 countries* speaking 181 languages power Drupal.”

DSpace and ePrints, on the other hand seem to stress the fact that they are open-access, while Omeka labels itself a platform for “serious” web publishing. By having such terms prominently displayed on the homepage such as “Dublin Core,” “Linux,” “Apache,” “MySQL,” and “PHP” it is skipping the amateur website developer and marketing to users with a substantial bit of IT/Digital Content background.

All sites appeared as the top result when Googled, all sites were “busy” and required a lot of scrutiny to find the sections of interest. I would not determine a final selection for repository software by the home page of the platform. I am much more interested in how I can use it, rather than how the organization has chosen to use it—our needs and user base are probably much different.