The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) needed an institutional repository that could handle more than just PDFs and text documents. Their knowledge base included photos, audio recordings, video archives, and maps — all sitting in scattered storage with no unified access layer.
DSpace, the most widely used open-source repository platform in the academic world, was the logical starting point. But out of the box, DSpace treats every file the same: upload it, attach Dublin Core metadata, and offer a download link. For multimedia content, that experience is inadequate. Users shouldn't have to download a 500MB video just to see if it's the right one.
What we built
The customized system — the Multimedia Institutional Repository (MIR) — extends DSpace to handle items based on their content type. Images render inline with proper previews. Audio and video content streams through integrated players directly in the browser, without requiring downloads. The metadata schema was extended beyond standard Dublin Core to capture multimedia-specific attributes like duration, resolution, codec information, and geographic context.
This matters more than it sounds in a UN context, where offices across Africa often operate on limited bandwidth. Previewing a document's metadata and streaming a 30-second audio clip is fundamentally different from downloading a full archive just to check its contents.
Metadata design
Standard Dublin Core gives you 15 elements — title, creator, subject, description, and so on. For text documents, that's usually sufficient. For multimedia, it's not. A video recording of a conference session needs fields for speakers, duration, language of the recording, related documents, and session context.
We developed an extended metadata framework that maintained Dublin Core compatibility (critical for interoperability with other institutional repositories) while adding the multimedia-specific fields UNECA needed. The goal was to let users preview content details and make relevance decisions before committing to a download.
Results
User acceptance testing showed strong agreement that MIR provided meaningful benefits over the base DSpace experience, particularly around navigation and content discovery. The bandwidth savings from inline previewing and streaming were significant for offices with constrained connectivity.
The full thesis is published at Addis Ababa University and available on Zenodo. The source code is on GitHub.