Invenio is an open source framework for building large-scale digital repositories.

A framework

Invenio is first and foremost a framework. It’s a framework that you can use to build a turn-key repository solution, but it is not by itself a final turn-key repository software. Using Invenio requires you to develop code.

Several repositories have been built on top of Invenio v3, including e.g.:

  • Zenodo - General purpose research data repository.
  • CERN Open Data - Open data repository for CERN.
  • CERN Videos - Digital Assets Management system with video encoding support.

Several repository software solutions are in the progress of being written on top of Invenio, including e.g.:

  • RERO ILS and Invenio ILS - Integrated Library System.
  • WEKO3 - Repository infrastructure for 500+ japanese universities.

Scalability & Safety

Two of the main strengths of Invenio is the scalability and safety. Invenio is built to run on anything from a single machine to clusters of 100s of machines, to handle 100 records or 100 million records as well as to handle a 1 megabyte or a 1 petabyte.

That’s why we say Invenio is a framework for large-scale digital repositories. Often, large-scale repositories does not fit in a standard box, which is why Invenio is first and foremost a framework that helps you build your repository faster and on a high-quality reliable foundation.

Flexible metadata

In its core, Invenio provides you with a flexible record and persistent identifier store capable of handling 100 millions of records. Records can use existing metadata formats such as JSON-LD, MARC21, DublinCore, DataCite, as well as your own custom or derived metadata format. Invenio easily handle multiple types of records such as bibliographic records, authority records, people, grants, funders, books and photos to name a few.

Internally Invenio natively store records as JSON documents whose structure can be validated and described with JSONSchemas. Records can easily be linked via JSONRef providing you with powerful tools to model your records. Invenio further comes with robust metadata transformation layer that can serialize records to e.g. MARCXML, DataCite XML, JSON-LD, Citation Style Langauge (CSL) JSON and many other formats.

In addition Invenio provides a persistent identifier store and a resolver that allows you to use your preferred persistent identifier scheme for identifying records such as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), Handles, PURLs, URNs or your own local identifier. The persistent identifer resolver further has support for advanced features such as tombstone pages, redirection and merged records.

File management

Invenio handles both millions of files and petabytes of data. Invenio provides natively on object storage REST API that concurrently can use multiple underlying storage systems such as S3, XRootD, NAS, WebDAV.

The file store further handles integrity checking according to desired schedules and supports even checking close to 1M files in less than an hour if your storage backend can support it.

The file store further comes with quota management that allows you detailed control of max file sizes and upload limits.