DSpace Newsletter: Winter 2003

[Margret Branschofsky]

DSpace Newsletter: Winter, 2003

MIT and Six Major Research Universities Announce
DSpace Federation Collaboration

Press Release: January 30, 2003, Cambridge, MA

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries have announced
initial development of the DSpace Federation with six major research
universities: Columbia University, Cornell University, Ohio State
University, and the Universities of Rochester, Toronto, and Washington.
DSpace, a digital repository for intellectual output, was launched
worldwide November 4, 2002 as an open source system, the result of a
two-year collaboration between the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories, HP's strategic research facility. The system is now in full
production at MIT, and holds approximately one thousand items from five
early-adopter communities.

 "The DSpace repository is initially addressing a growing institutional
need: how to collect, preserve, index and distribute the intellectual
output of an organization that originates in complex digital formats, said
Ann Wolpert, Director of the MIT Libraries. "This is a time-consuming task
for individual faculty and their departments, labs, and centers to manage,
and something that the DSpace system will make easier and more affordable."

MIT is now seeking to extend the scope of DSpace by offering it to other
research-intensive institutions as an open-source system, and to build a
Federation among these institutions. By making the system freely available
as open-source software, DSpace will enable even small colleges to run
repositories with existing resources. This project will explore the
adaptability of DSpace to institutions beyond MIT, develop documentation
for future Federators, and investigate new types of services that can be
built on federated collections held in DSpace repositories at different
institutions. MIT believes that by developing a Federation of institutions
that employ the same software and protocols, the sustainability and
potential for continued development of the system are enhanced.

The one-year project is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which
has awarded a $300,000 grant to MIT to work with the six institutions on
the further development of the DSpace Federation.  "The goals of the DSpace
Federation include developing a critical corpus of content that represents
the intellectual output of the world's leading research universities,
promoting the continued development of the DSpace service through the
open-source community, and promoting interoperability of archival
repositories and long-term preservation of scholarly work by complying with
published standards and supporting national and international initiatives
to develop standards in this domain," said MacKenzie Smith, Associate
Director for Technology in the MIT Libraries.


MIT AND SIX UNIVERSITIES ANNOUNCE DSPACE FEDERATION



Eugenie Prime, Director of HP's Corporate Research Libraries, said
"Establishing the DSpace Federation is an important step for MIT and their
partner institutions. It marks a transition in the way that academic
institutions and other enterprises provide stewardship for the digital
information that they produce.  HP Labs is proud to be deeply involved in
this transition."

Institutions participating in the DSpace Federation project represent a
range of organization types with varied motivations for investigating this
technology. Susan Gibbons, Director, Digital Library Initiatives,
University of Rochester, said "DSpace enhances learning by sharing
information as it develops and is exchanged through informal communication
by the academic community.  Perhaps most exciting is DSpace's potential to
create and enhance partnerships between libraries and those who generate
new knowledge on a university or college campus."

"Over a year ago Ohio State University began a project called the
'Knowledge Bank' to better organize the burgeoning amount of academic
digital assets being created by its faculty and students," said Joe Branin,
Director of the Ohio State University Libraries. "We quickly realized that
DSpace at MIT was an initiative and approach we needed to watch carefully.
Now, we are pleased to be one of the early partners to implement and
evaluate DSpace outside of MIT. We are, of course, interested in the
technical side of DSpace, but what impresses us most is the openness that
has characterized the whole DSpace development program at MIT, from their
open source system approach to their sharing on the Web all their planning
and policy documentation."



About DSpace
DSpace, a groundbreaking digital library system to capture, store, index,
preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output of a university's
research faculty in digital formats.

It is designed with a flexible storage and retrieval architecture adaptable
to a multitude of data formats and distinct research disciplines. Different
communities of an institution can adapt and customize the DSpace system to
meet their individual needs and manage the data submission process
themselves. Furthermore, a customized user portal can be created for each
community, promoting a user environment closely matching a community's own
terminology and culture. For more information on DSpace see
http://www.dspace.org/