These guidelines are targeted at academic institutions in developing countries world wide who want to start an open access research repository and who want to know in detail what is required and how to do it step-by-step. The guidelines below take a holistic and integrated approach to research institutional repository management. The focus during development of the system has been long term repository preservation, security, stability and interoperability on the internet, using open systems.
This paper introduces the concept of the simple persistent unique digital store which is an attempt to provide a means of digital
object storage that will survive one hundred years into the future using open standards , technologies and formats. In addition it will
attempt to make the digital object store independent of the software used to ingest, store, manage and disseminate the objects.
Doing this greatly eliminates the risk of the present interdependence of the digital object store with the institutional repository
management software and adds greater utility to future digital store management software systems.