March 27th, 2014 | Tags : Data Management | Category : bepress Development Blogs

Digital Commons Now Has Ten Times More Storage and Expanded Support for Data!

Data management is a big topic in the library world right now, and bepress has been working hard to meet the evolving data needs of our community. Today we’re excited to share our latest development improvements, which include a tenfold increase in storage and support for larger file sizes and data sets, among other things.

Since the launch of Digital Commons in 2002, bepress has steadily increased our file handling capabilities to stay ahead of the needs of the community. With the most recent improvements to the system, we can now accept files up to 2GB in size, making Digital Commons an ideal solution for the majority of publishable data sets generated by scholars. We’ve also doubled our bandwidth, enabling us to handle these bigger files with greater speed.

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Increasing file capacity on Digital Commons

In addition to this work, we’ve also spent the last year updating our storage infrastructure. The new infrastructure is being developed on the MogileFS platform, which allows us to sustainably grow along with our subscribers. As a result, we are raising our storage cap from 1 TB to 10 TB—offering ten times more free storage to Digital Commons subscribers and allowing us to stay well ahead of your storage needs in the future. Most of these changes are “under the hood,” meaning they will not be noticed by you or your users; however, we are also fine-tuning our submission page to be more responsive to file size and type.

We’re excited about these improvements, but want you to know that they’re just the beginning. Digital Commons already offers excellent discoverability for data sets, and we’re working on new initiatives to help the community better support data needs on campus. Want to learn more about publishing data? Register for our webinar, “Getting Started with Research Data in your Repository” on April 24th.