Brief history of OCTOPUS:
ISTI, "A. Faedo" Institute of Information Science and Technologies was born in 2002 from the union of the Institute of Information Processing, IEI and CNUCE "National University Center for Electronic Calculation" (CNR). The IEI library, today ISTI was one of the first IT libraries on a national level.
At the beginning of the year 2000, the IEI institute participated in several international projects such as ETRDL, DELOS and NCSTRL "The Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library" (Cornell University), acquiring considerable experience in the field of "Digital Library" and web services. "..
"OCTOPUS" is an architecture designed to create a service infrastructure for the management and conservation of collections of multi-format digital documents produced and managed independently by one or more institutions.
The idea was born from the experience made with the ETRDL system and following the need, manifested by the Library service, to be able to use a software tool capable of managing the complete management cycle concerning the scientific publications produced by the Institute.
In 2004, the "PUMA" software infrastructure (PUblication MAnagement) came to life, which based on the OCTOPUS architecture made available a functional system, suitable for an open service activity capable of supporting the following fundamental operations:
Acquisition of digital documents
Administration
Classification
Maintenance / Preservation
Research
Dissemination and control
Restitution / Reuse
With PUMA the first "Digital Library and Deposit" was created for the management of the scientific publications of the "ISTI" Institute which can be consulted freely by all via the "web", at the metadata level.
In collaboration with various "CNR" Libraries and the areas of Genoa and Bologna, the service was made available to all CNR institutes that requested it.
From 2004 to 2018 over 30 CNR institutes joined and used the PUMA service, collecting over 50,000 documents, most of which are "open access":
The PUMA software (2004 version) was developed using "open access" software starting from the "linux" operating system (Debian - Ubuntu versions), from the "Apache HTTP Server web service", from the MySQL database service, from the PHP language , HTML and JavaScript.
During 2018, for various organizational reasons of the Institute and in the face of new directives of the institution regarding the management of publications produced by all the institutes, it was decided to discontinue the use of the "PUMA" service and to switch to the use of others innovative tools arranged by the head office.
The "ISTI-NeMIS" laboratory, promoter of PUMA, has decided to keep the PUMA system active as a historical archive for consultation only.
In addition to PUMA, other new applications based on OCTOPUS were born, aimed at managing "digital libraries and archives" of specific data collections, such as: LVDL, MeCME, GEO, GreyGuideRep.
During 2017, with the evolution of systems, both hardware and software, it was necessary to review and update the original version of PUMA (hereinafter PUMA_DC) with a new version (hereinafter PUMA_X) adequate with respect to the new services and operating systems always strictly "open-access". The "PUMA_X" update has been extended to all OCTOPUS instances that continue to be operational.
The main changes between the two versions (v.2004 - v.2017) were three:
1) - the first concerned the hierarchical structure in OCTOPUS of the two levels which respectively indicate the name of the collection and the owner of the collection (Colletcion / Authority) which was inverted in (Authority / Collection);
2) - the second concerned the structure of the "bibliographic record" moving from a metadata system based on "Dublin Core" to one based on XML;
3) - the third concerned the "character set" going from "iso8859-1" to "utf8".
For further details on the OCTOPUS architecture see: this document