Architecture and Features
Federation
The national repository SWITCHcollection is a federation of repository systems . A swiss higher education institution is free to choose whatever repository system they prefer. It can be attached to the federation, if it supports metadata harvesting. Those institutions who do not want to run their own repository system have the possibility use the centralized repository hosted by SWITCH.
Contents are manually uploaded to the repository system, either to the local institutional repository or the community repository. Alternatively, contents are directly ingested by repositories such as learning management systems, video management systems or any other specialized or general purpose media management system.
Structure and Organization
All institutions who participate in the federation are free to define their internal structure and organization.
Search
By default, search requests are performed on the complete pool of objects in all repositories which are part of the federation. All available metadata information is used to search for objects. Additionally, full-text search is applied for objects that are stored in the community repository.
APIs
To enable the integration of SWITCHcollection into existing infrastucture, various Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are available: REST interface for ingest and search, OAI-PMH to harvest metadata, lorem to embed part of SWITCHcollection into web pages and loroform to semi-automatically upload new contents to the community repository.
