Dear Mohammad, The proposed single-instance approach is very promising, particularly allowed to create a truly national research repository with centralized discovery, consistent metadata, and delegated administration across 130 universities.
This is also a relatively ambitious and, in my view, rare undertaking at a national scale. I would encourage the team to pursue it; it is certainly technically possible, provided the architecture is designed for scalability from the beginning. One area I would suggest exploring is the infrastructure architecture. Since recent DSpace versions are already Dockerized, it may be worth considering *Kubernetes* given the scale and complexity of the project. This would provide greater flexibility to horizontally scale the DSpace application, search, and other components as usage and repository content grow, rather than relying on a single large server. I would also recommend considering scalable object storage, centralized IAM/SSO with HRMS-driven groups and roles, and a standardized national information architecture while still allowing universities appropriate administrative autonomy. In short, I think the vision is achievable. The key is to treat the single DSpace instance as a *scalable distributed national platform rather than a single-server deployment*, with sufficient room to grow as adoption increases. Best regards, Kevon On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 7:46 PM Mo Asendy <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello DSpace Community, > > We are currently planning a national repository platform using a single > DSpace instance to serve approximately 130 universities across Iraq. I > would appreciate your advice on the best approach for structuring an > implementation of this scale. > > Our main challenge is mapping each university’s organizational > structure—including central libraries, college libraries, colleges, and > other equivalent units—to DSpace’s community, subcommunity, and collection > hierarchy. > > We also need to map users and roles received from our HRMS to the > appropriate levels within this hierarchy. > > Our current proposal is to: > > - Create one top-level community for each university. > - Create subcommunities for colleges, libraries, and other equivalent > university units. > - Assign each library manager an administrative role at the > appropriate subcommunity level. > - Assign librarians submitter or editor permissions at the relevant > level. > - Allow each college or library to independently create and manage > collections for open-access materials, student projects, research outputs, > and similar content. > > Has anyone implemented a similar multi-university structure, particularly > at this scale? We would appreciate any recommendations regarding the most > scalable and maintainable hierarchy, permission model, and HRMS > role-mapping approach. > > We want to ensure that Iraq’s national repository platform is designed > correctly from the beginning and follows DSpace best practices. > > *Please leave any other recommendations for a national-level library > system (we are also using an independent Koha instance for each university > and Vufind as a discovery layer)* > > Best regards, > Mohammad Al-Sendy > > -- > All messages to this mailing list should adhere to the Code of Conduct: > https://lyrasis.org/code-of-conduct/ > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "DSpace Community" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-community/64dbe9cf-3edf-4f29-a5f6-f99f9e51c518n%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-community/64dbe9cf-3edf-4f29-a5f6-f99f9e51c518n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- All messages to this mailing list should adhere to the Code of Conduct: https://lyrasis.org/code-of-conduct/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DSpace Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-community/CA%2BLKazoaidT99h5rb_4LH%2BnVgFo3ssSP3bMvXkXNH4O%2BbrA6%2BA%40mail.gmail.com.
