DSpace:

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DSpace

• Or How an Electronic Resource Management
  Enterprise at MIT Solved all the Problems of the
  Digital World.

Butch Lazorchak INLS 235 Digital Library Review
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DSpace What is it, exactly?

• A Digital Depository
• A Digital Repository
• An Open Source Software Platform
• A Specialized Type of Digital Asset Management or
  Content Management System
• A Groundbreaking Digital Library System

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• Digital libraries are different from
  traditional library automation in that they are
  designed to support the creation, maintenance,
  management, access to, and preservation of
  digital content.
• - Bernie Hurley, the Director for Library
  Technologies at the University of California,
  Berkeley in Digital Library Technology Trends,
  Sun Microsystems White Paper (August 2002) 3.
• The first idea emphasizes the fact that digital
  libraries are computer-based systems constructed
  for people to use and that they are extensions of
  information storage and retrieval systems. The
  second emphasizes the belief that digital
  libraries should be constructed in a way that
  accommodates the actual tasks and activities that
  people engage when they create, seek, and use
  information resources in this sense they are an
  extension of physical environments.
• -Social Aspects of Digital Libraries, Final
  Report of the UCLA-NSF Social Aspects of Digital
  Libraries Workshop, November 1996.

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Welcome to Acronymland!
MITCET-MIT Council on Educational Technology
OCW-Open Courseware DSpace-digital space,
design space, dissemination space or some
combination of all or none of those Invent_at_MIT,
the HP-MIT Alliance (a joint venture) MIT
Libraries operate DSpace at MIT
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• DSpace has their own mission
• to provide stable long-term storage to house the
  digital products of MIT faculty and researchers
• to provide long-term preservation for digital
  materials in a variety of formats, including
  text, audio, video, images, datasets and more
• and to enable remote access to those materials
  through one coherent interface.
• And the side-effects
• The Destruction of the Academic Publishing System
  as we know it
• Education wants to be free!

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• DSpace Whats it look like?

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OK, so why should I care? That was the most
boring thing Ive ever seen!
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Theyve figured it all out

• Complete digital asset management system
• Open source solution
• Support for long-term preservation
• All data types supported, including ones that
  havent even been invented yet
• Protects and guarantees the authenticity of the
  digital materials over time
• Bundles rights management information with each
  digital artifact
• Supports interoperability

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DSpace the elegant integration of user-centered
and system-centered capabilities

• Users
• Contributors
• Researchers
• End Users
• Content and Services
• Content Types
• Submission Process
• Technology

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Who are These Users

• Contributors
• MIT Faculty exclusively (at the moment)
• Researchers
• Federators (Columbia, Cornell, Ohio State, Us of
  Rochester, Washington, Toronto)
• End Users
• You and me, brothers and sisters

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Content and Services

• Content Types-
• Any kind of digital content imaginable
• Long-term preservation support for the actual
  bits is guaranteed
• Software types are maintained and supported
  through the use of a bitstream manager
• Submission Process
• A Sharium! Decentralized submission process
• Ingest process which incorporates human-edited
  and machine-annotated processes
• Provenance and authentication through the use of
  checksums
• Handle System persistent identifiers
• Rights management utilizing Creative Commons
  licenses

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Technology

• Open Source-get it at SourceForge
• Scalable-from your laptop to the mountaintop (as
  long as its a Unix-type environment)
• Dublin Core DC-LIB metadata schema, but SIMILE
  (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and
  Information in unLike Environments) is on the way
  (http//web.mit.edu/dspace-dev/www/simile/)
• Interoperability (Semantic Web, OAI) Intelligent
  Agents Complex metadata schemas

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DSpace Good

• A Complete Scalable System
• Providing for Long-term
• ACCESS
• PRESERVATION
• AUTHENTICITY
• RIGHTS MANAGEMENT
• Outside of propriety constraints
• And with a vision of how digital information can
  serve us in the future

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