OKRt

OKRt is an open-source software framework and standard for managing and sharing knowledge resources across digital repositories. It provides a modular toolkit designed to enable institutions to curate, index, search, and disseminate documents, datasets, and metadata. The acronym OKRt stands for Open Knowledge Resources toolkit, with the “t” signaling Toolkit.

History and purpose

The concept emerged in 2020 from a consortium of university libraries and cultural heritage institutions seeking interoperable repository tools. The first public release occurred in 2022, with ongoing community contributions and frequent updates to expand features, improve interoperability, and address use-case diversity.

Architecture and components

OKRt features a modular architecture built around several core components: a Resource Registry for metadata storage with versioning and provenance tracking; a Metadata Layer supporting standards such as Dublin Core, MODS, MARCXML, and Schema.org; Access Control and Permissions to manage user rights; a Search and Discovery Engine enabling federated queries across multiple registries; and an API and Software Development Kit for integration. A Plugin framework allows extensibility (import/export, format adapters, analytics). The system also supports harvesting protocols like OAI-PMH and linked data representations via JSON-LD.

Standards and interoperability

The framework emphasizes compatibility with widely used metadata standards and supports localization and multilingual metadata. It aims to facilitate persistent identifiers and interoperability between disparate institutional systems, enabling cross-institution discovery and data portability.

Adoption and use cases

National libraries, universities, and cultural heritage organizations have adopted OKRt to modernize collection management, improve metadata quality, and enable cross-institution search across digital archives, research data repositories, and catalogs.

Governance and community

OKRt is released under an open-source license and developed through a community-driven process. A Technical Steering Committee oversees major directions, with public documentation, issue trackers, and contribution guidelines to encourage participation.