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

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

“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.

Welcome to Acronymland! OCW-Open Courseware DSpace-“digital space,” “design space,” “dissemination space” or some combination of all or none of those the HP-MIT Alliance (a joint venture) MIT Libraries operate DSpace at MIT MITCET-MIT Council on Educational Technology

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!

DSpace: What’s it look like?

OK, so why should I care? That was the most boring thing I’ve ever seen!

They’ve figured it all out: Complete digital asset management system Open source solution Support for long-term preservation All data types supported, including ones that haven’t 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

DSpace: the elegant integration of user-centered and system- centered capabilities Users Contributors Researchers End Users Content and Services Content Types Submission Process Technology

Who are These “Users” Contributors MIT Faculty exclusively (at the moment) Researchers Federators (Columbia, Cornell, Ohio State, U’s of Rochester, Washington, Toronto) End Users You and me, brothers and sisters

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

Technology Open Source-get it at SourceForge Scalable-from your laptop to the mountaintop (as long as it’s 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 ( dev/www/simile/) dev/www/simile/ Interoperability (Semantic Web, OAI); Intelligent Agents; Complex metadata schemas

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