Over the years, (institutional) repositories and content management systems (CMS) have seen a great amount of feature overlap. However, both systems remain distinct in their underlying purposes and the needs they fulfill.
Although this is a generalization, repositories and content management systems tend to differ in the following ways:
Content Management Systems (CMS)
- Generally speaking, a CMS may be thought of as a digital content creation & publication system
- Geared towards content creation / production and online publication
- Geared towards collaborative creation/modification of content
- Geared towards general usage (used for any general digital content)
- May also be geared towards building websites and creating content for the web
(Institutional) Repositories
- Generally speaking, a Repository may be thought of as a digital "archives" system
- Geared towards long-term storage, digital preservation and accessibility of completed content
- Geared towards ensuring and maintaining provenance of completed or published content
- Primarily used for scholarly and/or published content (though may be used for general content as well)
- Tends to also follow latest library/archival best practices (around metadata, preservation, persistent URLs, etc.)
There are scenarios where one may wish to choose either a CMS or a Repository:
Some general benefits of a Content Management System:
- More conducive to collaborative creation of content/documents
- Often better for highly dynamic content ("living documents")
- Often better for building websites (which by nature are rapidly changing / evolving)
Some general benefits of a Repository:
- Often provides more digital preservation tools or integrations with such tools (e.g. file format validation/verification, integrity checking, integrations with Antivirus software, etc.)
- Often provides persistent URLs (Handles, DOIs and/or PURLs) for all digital content to help ensure long term access
- Tends to follow latest library and archives best practices around metadata (e.g. Dublin Core, MODS, METS, etc.), digital preservation (e.g. OAIS, TRAC, PREMIS, etc.), and interoperability (e.g. OAI-PMH, SWORD protocol, OAI-ORE, etc.)
- Often better at long term preservation & access of finished/published documents
It is worth noting that choosing a CMS or a repository is not necessarily an "either/or" option. Based on your local needs, you may wish to use both systems in your document creation and preservation workflow. For example, a CMS may be used to collaboratively create your digital content. Once the digital content is completed, it may be archived/preserved within a repository. Alternatively, your CMS may wish to pull archived content from an external repository in order to allow for content reuse/remix, or to simply expose your archived content through the same interface as your dynamic/collaborative content. Many popular Content Management Systems provide modules or add-ons that allow them to integrate directly into popular repository platforms.
Some examples of using a Repository with a CMS:
- Islandora is built on the Drupal CMS platform and stores its content in a Fedora Repository
- Drupal's DSpace module allows one to pull DSpace repository content/metadata into a Drupal CMS
- Joomla's DSpace module (J-CAR) allows one to pull DSpace repository content/metadata into a Joomla CMS
Additional Points of View:
- "Alternatives to Repositories", published by JISC infoNet