VITAL

About the software

Web site

http://www.vtls.com/Products/vital.shtml

Licensing

VITAL is available under a commercial license with an up-front purchase price and annual maintenance.

Date of this document

February 2007

Versions tested

VITAL  2.1.2

VITAL 3.0 testing will conclude by April 2007

RUBRIC project recommendation

RUBRIC-central recommended installing version 2.1, still waiting on version 3.

Disclosure: Australian RUBRIC sites were able to purchase VITAL licenses using money granted to the project by the Australian Government.

Like Fez, VITAL is a maturing system build on the Fedora back-end. Version 2 was released in 2006 and patches were  issued to fix performance issues and bugs. Version 3 will be released in 2007.

VITAL has a flexible portal system that should meet the needs of most institutions. There is a web ingest package known as VALET which can handle simple ingest workflows, but which regrettably does not use the Fedora back-end, and cannot be used on objects once they have been ingested into Fedora.

VITAL supports collections of objects, but RUBRIC-central experienced problems with this feature in version 2.1. We are not particularly concerned about this issue, as we do not suggest our partners use collections.

Support & Hosting options

VTLS offers full installation and maintenance. We do not know of any providers currently offering hosting services.

RQF support

The vendor and the ARROW project are working with the MAMS project to build RQF support into Vital. This may be available as early as mid 2007.

Who should consider this software?

Like Fez there are only a handful of live sites, and only a limited number community members who have seen-through deployment of an Open Access repository.

VITAL may appeal to institutions with an established relationship with the company VTLS. We have experienced customer service and software release practices similar to other VTLS software.

For others, we note that as with any commercial software it is important to find reference sites using the software for similar purposes to those proposed for one's own and to explore with the reference site how the relationship with the vendor is working.