Belgrade Showcase
How the University of Belgrade Library Built a National Legacy on Open Source.
The Dependable Machine
In any organisation the size of Belgrade University, achieving a consensus on core technology infrastructure can be a tough call. Where that technology impacts at the very heart of scholarly communication, and where it can affect how research is conducted, recorded and shared, universal agreement between 31 independent faculties and thousands of researchers is all but impossible.
"Over the years, some departments have adopted their own specialist digital repositories or chased new solutions with the latest features. Different repositories have come and gone, and some researchers will doubtlessly adopt other new solutions in the future," admits Dragana Stolić, the library's head of PhD support services, reflecting on fifteen years of evolution in the University's infrastructure.
But within this flux, one solution has quietly and reliably endured. Selected by the university library in 2010, the open source PHAIDRA repository has remained the university's "dependable machine": cost-effective, stable, and steadfast in its mission of permanent archiving. While technological trends shift and departmental priorities diverge, the story of PHAIDRA is one of considered evolution and steady progress. And PHAIDRA's dependability has made it the one repository solution that the university keeps returning to.
PHAIDRA Origins
PHAIDRA started life as an internal project within the University of Vienna. It provides end-user-friendly repository services on top of the open source Fedora repository platform. Where Fedora offers a trusted, well architected and stable backend solution for the long-term preservation of diverse digital assets, PHAIDRA was built to offer an integrated stack of all the additional features and components needed to deliver a finished user-facing solution.
Once tested and stable, PHAIDRA was released as its own open source project, free for other institutions to use.
From Local Pilot to National Standard
The University of Belgrade was introduced to PHAIDRA through their role as regional project leaders for an EU initiative entitled "New Library Services at Universities of the Western Balkans". The initiative was part of the Tempus Programme, aimed at supporting the modernisation of higher education in EU-neighbouring countries, through the transfer of knowledge and infrastructure.
As a part of this transfer, the repository was first installed at the library in Belgrade in 2011. Initially, it was little more than a working proof of concept. But when the Serbian government began looking for a software solution to preserve doctoral theses across all Serbian universities, they needed a proven system. The working installation at Belgrade University Library was an obvious contender.
In contrast to many alternative systems at the time, PHAIDRA offered a free and open source solution that could be owned and run in Serbia. It was also a project developed by a university, for other institutions that shared its priorities: the need for stable, affordable long-term preservation for digital assets.
However, the ultimate deciding factor was PHAIDRA's ability to handle more than documents and PDFs. The library team in Belgrade could see that digitally preserving research demanded far more than safely conserving documented results. Digital archives needed to hold the underlying research data. And diverse image, sound, video and other media files were also becoming an essential part of preserving research in a meaningful way.
"PHAIDRA is inclusive: you can preserve video materials and diverse media formats. This allowed us to digitally preserve more of the research itself, and not just a write-up of the results," explains Stolić. "The research is kept as a living cannon that people can come back to. They can see it in the full context of its surrounding resources, re-examine it, repeat and verify it, and build on it in the future."
PHAIDRA allowed the team in Belgrade to handle the full spectrum of academic output—from arts and humanities multimedia to complex scientific data. They were able to create an archive of the university's doctoral output that was consistent, permanent, and secure, but perhaps most importantly, one that was comprehensive. The Belgrade University Library was chosen as the central technical hub for the entire country delivering services to all other universities including University of Niš and the University of Kragujevac. And PHAIDRA still remains as the core underlying platform for the Serbian national archive for doctoral theses.
The Plateau Years
Following PHAIDRA's initial success at Belgrade, the system continued to perform its core archiving mission flawlessly for PhD theses. However, the library struggled to enhance PHAIDRA and drive broader departmental adoption across the university.
"For a long period, we just had to sustain the current situation," Stolić admits, describing "a flat line era" where limited IT resources prevented significant development.
This is a common challenge for many users of open source infrastructure: while the tools are free to adopt, they still require an investment of time and energy. With any evolving project, migrating to updated versions of the software requires dedicated technical capacity. And to get the most from open source, users often need to invest time back into the community and developing the project itself.
For many users in Belgrade, PHAIDRA's original search functionality was the most pressing concern. The original Vienna-designed system needed significant work to handle seamless searching across both Cyrillic and Latin scripts, and this was a fundamental requirement for the region.
Without budget for major customisation, some wealthier faculties began pursuing their own solutions. Molecular Biology, for instance, purchased DSpace, attracted by its dynamic interface and international popularity. PHAIDRA, by contrast, remained focused on what it did best: permanent, secure archiving. To some, this made it appear static—a place where research was preserved, but not a part of active online academic discourse.
Nonetheless, while other systems demanded increasingly heavy support, maintenance and licensing costs, PHAIDRA remained the "dependable machine" — reliable, consistent, and quietly resolute.
Renaissance Through Community
The turning point for the system came in 2018, when Belgrade's technical team attended their first PHAIDRA partner meeting. This proved transformative: not because of any single feature or announcement, but because it revealed how the open source model could work in their favour.
While Belgrade had continued running their 2009 installation, development of PHAIDRA had continued at pace: both in Vienna and among a growing community of international users. The community meeting revealed a mature platform that had evolved and incorporated significant new functionality over the preceding decade. Just as importantly, other members of the community were also able to offer help and insight around some common technical challenges.
Following this meeting, the team in Belgrade saw the real value in aligning themselves more closely with the project community. And with minimal assistance from the development team in Vienna, the library's busy tech support engineer Nemanja Žikić managed to carve out the time to upgrade their system to the latest version of PHAIDRA.
The upgrade brought them a system that had been fundamentally enhanced. And for Belgrade, the new integration of Apache Solr — one of the world's most powerful open source search engines — was more than just a technical improvement. Solr's sophisticated linguistic capabilities instantly solved the Cyrillic-Latin alphabet challenge that had frustrated their users for years. Alongside this, Solr also delivered advanced faceting and relevance ranking, providing the type of advanced usability features that other platforms often used to justify higher charges.
National Adoption Through the eScience Project
Shortly after the migration, the Serbian Ministry of Science launched the eScience Project. This was a new national research hub designed to harvest, consolidate and showcase all outputs from repositories across the country's universities. For the project to work effectively and integrate with broader international academic systems, the Ministry had to enforce strict new metadata requirements on any underlying repositories connected to the new system (these were based on the Dublin Core and OAI-PMH protocols).
For faculties that had chosen, purchased or developed their own repositories, this created an uncomfortable budget reality. Licensing, maintaining or purchasing the necessary support for these systems was expensive. On top of this, many of them struggled to meet the government's technical requirements without additional custom development.
But with over a decade of feature advancements that were based on real end user demands and requirements, the newly upgraded PHAIDRA met these requirements immediately.
Interoperability had always been central to the Vienna team's design philosophy, and the standards the government required were already built into the platform's foundation. The library launched a dedicated "PHAIDRA Research" instance without costly customisation or emergency development.
"We were able to offer the research community our service as the quickest and easiest way to participate in the national system," explains Stolić. Researchers across disciplines—from soil science to the humanities—began returning to the library's repository. PHAIDRA's perceived limitation as a basic solution became its strength: it was efficient, standards-compliant, and cost-effective.
PHAIDRA's relevance to the eScience Project has given a new impetus to the entire service. Nearly 30 new faculty collections have been created, and PHAIDRA has been transformed from a passive archive into a vital, active node in Serbia's national research infrastructure.
From Archive to Action: PHAIDRA MILAGRO
The University of Belgrade is now among the most active members of the international PHAIDRA community. Alongside attending the annual PHAIDRAcon gatherings, they now present their own talks and regularly share their expertise and experience within community calls and on forums.
Most recently, this experience has taken the Belgrade Library team, and PHAIDRA, beyond the boundaries of traditional scholarly communication.
The Milagro project ("MIgrants and Local communities Actively GROwing together for inclusive societies") is an EU-funded initiative with the valuable objective of bringing together local populations and migrant communities through storytelling, art workshops, sport, and digital literacy training. PHAIDRA has been introduced into the project to address a fundamental problem: impermanence as erasure.
With previous projects, Stolić had watched as valuable workshop output was uploaded to temporary project websites. But when funding ended, the sites went static. Eventually, they disappeared entirely, and the knowledge vanished with them.
"We noticed that project deliverables were just presented on a website and that was it. There was no interoperability, no long-term archiving, and the real value of the output just didn't seem to be being recognised," explains Stolić. "This would be unthinkable in an academic environment: doctoral theses are preserved with rigorous metadata, permanent identifiers, and institutional guarantees of accessibility. But for the stories and creative work of some of Europe's most marginalised people, there were only temporary websites and broken links."
Stolić and her team resolved to help Milagro deliver a more permanent output and they established a dedicated PHAIDRA instance for the project. However, it was also important that this instance was not a static deposit box. Stolić wanted to build a living repository designed to make community-generated assets findable and reusable in real time.
The Milagro project's public face is "The Observatory": a Wordpress site with an interactive geospatial map guiding users to legal help, food, and shelter. But behind this, PHAIDRA now functions as a stable engine. Every asset deposited — from visual art, literature and oral histories, to local advice and legal information — now receives proper Creative Commons licensing and structured metadata. These are preserved in the repository alongside scientific papers and other outputs looking at migration.
PHAIDRA provides a living archive of these diverse assets, combining civic and scientific outputs related to migration. Milagro participants can now see that their creative work is contributing to a meaningful record of shared experiences and shared emotion. The project helps deliver a valuable sense of permanence and belonging to a group where this is in very short supply.
Community workers and diverse groups across Europe can bridge their seclusion to feel part of something bigger, share insights and learn from one another. While for future generations of academic researchers, the project permanently preserves an important piece of lived experience in our time.
The same reliability that preserved Serbia's doctoral output for fifteen years now preserves migrant voices with equal rigor. And PHAIDRA has proven that a "dependable machine" need not be static: it can form the foundation for building living, breathing community projects, and it can give vulnerable stories the permanence they deserve.
Conclusion
From securing the first digital copies of PhD theses, to powering the Serbian national e-Science network, and now preserving an important cultural record of migration stories, PHAIDRA has proven that in the long term, steady reliability is the ultimate feature.
Belgrade Library's journey with PHAIDRA is not your typical corporate fairytale of an IT solution that instamagically solves all the user's problems. Over the years, Belgrade University Library and PHAIDRA have evolved and grown together.
PHAIDRA has become a shared technological base for a much more important open source community. This community is built on a common need to preserve important digital artifacts. When the project began, this primarily meant providing safe, secure, long term storage and retrieval. Over time, this has evolved and PHAIDRA is now about the long-term integration of these digital assets into human lives, our society and the global system for research, learning and knowledge sharing.