This week we were asked to look at the home sites of the repositories we have experimented with so far this semester. I found that my favorite sites are attractive and clean-looking, with easy-to-find basic information and forums. Omeka's site meets these qualifications: the community forums are easy to find and are organized into different topics such as "Troubleshooting" and "Plugins," making the help you need easier to find. It emphasizes the community aspect further with its "Get Involved" page, to help you improve and contribute to Omeka. Information on installing and using it was easy to find.
Drupal also emphasizes community, with various ways of connecting to other users such as forums, mailing lists, and chat. It also has a "Getting Involved" page with information on how to build modules, design themes, etc. The site for PKP Open Archives Harvester is also attractive and easy to use, with forums, a wiki, and information on education and training which is easy to find.
DSpace has a nice, intuitive site with good basic training materials. However, community does not seem to be as strongly emphasized as the previous three sites, with mailing lists as the only apparent option to communicate with other users. EPrints is similar in its use of a mailing-list-only community, but is a useful site if a little more sparse than the others. I like that they have a page for training and tutorial materials, as well as a FAQ page. Jhove's site was the least useful for my purposes: it is not very user-friendly for a beginner and uses more technical language. There was no community support that I could find.
I think that a repository's home site is very important in my selection criteria: I feel more confident using a repository which seems friendly to new users, community-oriented, and has clear training materials. After my evaluation, I felt that the Omeka, Drupal, and PKP Open Archives Harvester sites were particularly strong on all of these points
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