Invenio is a free and open source software suite for management of digital library or document repository on the web. Invenio enables you to run your repository covering all associated functionality: data acquisition, classification, indexing, storage, release, and distribution. The software is mainly aimed at creating open access middle-to-large scale (several millions of records) repositories for scholarly documents and/or published digital content.
Initially Invenio has been developed at CERN Document Server Software Consortium to run their document server with over 1 million bibliographic records (including articles, books, and journals in high-energy physics, as well as photos, videos, etc.). Now Invenio is used by about thirty scientific institutions worldwide. To accommodate the growing demand for support of the service TIND Technologies was established in 2013 as the service provider.
Invenio is distributed under a GPL2 license and uses Apache/WSGI, Python, and MySQL. Its modular design and flexibility make it a comprehensive solution for a wide variety of usages. Invenio complies with the Open Archives Initiative protocol (OAI-PMH 2.0) for collecting metadata and uses MARC 21 as the basic format of bibliographic data. These open standards ensure interoperability with other digital libraries.
Documents are organised in collection trees. Invenio offers several features such as: navigation for these hierarchical collections, regular and virtual collection trees, and customizable portalboxes for each collection. Also repositories have powerful and fast internal search engine provided by specially designed indexes. There are two customizable search interfaces: simple and advanced. They provide combined metadata, full text and citation search, as well as results clustering by collection.
Flexibility in the use of metadata is ensured by standard metadata format (MARC). There are multiple export formats: HTML, XML, MARC, OAI. As for customization of user interface, features like user-defined document baskets and automated email notification alerts, basket-sharing within user groups, assist in personalization.
What distinguishes Invenio among other similar tools, is that it offers a lot more functionality than managing a digital library. For instance, Invenio fulfills the functions of an ILS standard (like debt management, statistics, etc.) and open archive (user can do self-archiving).
Invenio is widely-used software package for digital assets and documents management in an institutional repository on the web. For more detailed information visit invenio-software website.