DSpace Newsletter, Spring 2003
Response to DSpace Launch
The DSpace system was officially released as open source on November 4,
2003, to coincide with a symposium held at MIT on the problems of scholarly
communication (on view at MIT World,
http://web.mit.edu/mitworld/content/libraries/). Both the symposium and the
code release were marked by a great deal of publicity, and the response so
far has been phenomenal. Statistics from SourceForge, the system housing
the open source code, indicate that DSpace has been downloaded by more than
2,500 organizations and individuals world-wide, over ten percent of which
have been in direct contact with the DSpace team to indicate serious
interest in deploying the system for their institution. In just four months
we have begun to see the fruits of the open source process with several
institutions helping us debug the system and make improvements to it. This
is fantastic progress, and we are all excited by the interest and goodwill
towards DSpace that we’re seeing.
New Release Scheduled
DSpace is currently at version 1.0.1 on SourceForge
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace/) with a new release planned for
April 14. The next release will fix all the currently known major bugs, and
add some badly needed features to the system, including: standard usage
reports for Communities, improved quality control during submission, some
features needed to support workflows typically associated with e-theses.
Maybe more… We plan to keep DSpace on a quarterly release schedule if the
work continues at the current pace. Feedback on this is very welcome.
Also recently released is a revised and updated set of technical
documentation (version 1.0.1-1). The installation instructions have been
extensively rewritten based on feedback from early implementers, and we’ve
added sections on the system architecture and the administrative user
interface. Anyone currently working with DSpace should consider picking up
this documentation from SourceForge or at
http://dspace.org/technology/system-docs/index.html.
A new addition to the team, Richard Rodgers, is serving as this year’s
DSpace Federation Systems Manager. Richard is working on procedures for
release management, and making changes to the DSpace code (i.e. fixing bugs
or adding features). The list of currently identified bugs and new
features is on SourceForge, where you’ll also find the dspace-tech listserv
for asking and answering technical questions related to DSpace. Richard can
be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
DSpace Federation
Finally, a word on the progress of the DSpace Federation. The Federation is
still in the concept stage, but we’re making progress. Through grants from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Cambridge-MIT Institute, MIT
Libraries are working with a small number of other large academic research
institutions in the US, Canada, and the UK to test the application of
DSpace in other university settings, to discuss what sort of
multi-institutional federated services might usefully be built on the
DSpace platform, and to explore how interoperability among these
organizations’ systems may create a far more valuable resource than is
possible through individual instantiations. For more information on these
projects see http://dspace.org/news/newsletters/200301.html or contact the
DSpace Federation project manager, Jackie Agnew, at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
There are a couple of things happening on the Federation front: we are
getting detailed feedback from the seven partner institutions about the
DSpace system technical issues, but also policy, service, and business
issues that are critical to the successful implementation of an
institutional repository. At the same time, we’re hearing from lots of
other institutions about their plans for using the system, and what they
like and dislike about it. All of this is helping us understand the support
requirements for a system like DSpace.
The DSpace Federation may come to mean a set of services that support
multi-institutional, or inter-institutional, functions (e.g. virtual
collections, distributed publications, remote administrative services,
etc.). It also may be the focal point for integrating development work such
as bug fixes and enhancements from users worldwide. It might equally come
to mean the organization which funds and maintains the DSpace system as it
grows and evolves and is used by more and more organizations worldwide. As
the year progresses we hope to be able to say a lot more about this, so
stay tuned…
MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology & DSpace Project Director
MIT Libraries
March, 2003