I'm an archival educator who specializes in digital archivy. We've been experimenting with DSpace since early 2003 to see how it can serve as a digital archives for persistent-to-permanent preservation of born-digital (and reborn-digital) objects (https://pacer.ischool.utexas.edu). We have done projects on faculty papers, homegrown software tutorials, snapshots of websites before redesign, and incubator projects for campus archives (content mostly closed to online access for copyright reasons) including digital collections from literary figures (Mailer, Wesker, McNally from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center) and videogame materials (Sanger, Spector, Kelley from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History Videogame Archive). Hence we host a complex mix of materials with very various intellectual property issues.
We chose DSpace to proceed to these actual archiving projects in 2005 because it has proved robust and secure. We have our own set of problems that aren't solved by DSpace, including those related to archival descriptive practice, for which some IR+ features would be very interesting; for example, we have been making use of the description feature on community and collection pages to provide the fundamental aggregate descriptive elements for archival corpora (biographical or historical and scope and content), but at present those fields aren't even indexed in DSpace and they don't inherit in any out-of-the-box way (although Google seems to see things as we intend), so we might be able to adapt the "author page" idea to that purpose were it implemented in DSpace. I am hoping, however, that DSpace continues to develop and improve on what I see from my perspective as core issues of persistence, complex (but easier to understand, please!) authentication schemes, and metadata flexibility beyond the core. There has been a lot of discussion about whether IRs should care about persistence, but I suggest that as more IRs contain humanities scholarship, with its much more intensely cumulative scholarship practices, there will be a need to develop a less presentist attitude toward persistence than I have seen in some such discussions. It would be useful to review the use cases for which DSpace is being applied or adapted in some more thorough way than conference papers or listserv discussions, useful as both are. I welcome this discussion, however; as others have suggested, it's always easier to say what you like or don't when a running system is before you, particularly one that seems to be so admirably fit for purpose. Pat Galloway School of Information University of Texas at Austin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com _______________________________________________ Dspace-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-general
