On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 02:27:57PM -0400, Kevin P. Foote wrote: > 1) Is there a -newbie- guide somewhere to aid w/ understanding of > communities and collections? Something that would give examples of > hierarchies that people use. Do I make a top <institution> community and > then make a bunch of collections / colleges? Do I just start off making > communities and collections from colleges?
An understandable uncertainty. There are rules about what kinds of things can contain other kinds of things, but no hard-and-fast rules for how you use all those containers. One problem is that the top of the object hierarchy in DSpace is Site, which contains Community objects, but Site is never called out by name. There's only one, and you are in effect looking at it when you come to the main DSpace page. If you have defined at least one Community within the Site then you see the Community list on that page. So, if you are only representing one <institution> then you can let the main page stand for that <institution> and start creating Community objects to represent some aspect of its logical structure, such as colleges and (perhaps) administrative units. Communities can contain sub-communities to any sane depth, if you need to model a deep hierarchy. If you're a consortium then you might want to create a Community for each member <institution>, or a Community for each distinct function or organ of the consortium (and sub-communities as needed to organize their Collections). You need to think a bit about how you can best organize the contributions to your repository -- how people in the organization think about its structure, or even better, how users of those contributions will likely think about subject matter distinctions. You might want to enlist the aid of a librarian, if you have a good high-level grasp of just what sort of materials you intend to collect. You could also think about whether you plan to centralize or distribute administration of the materials. If colleges and departments will handle their own portions of the repository then you may want to model the formal reporting structure of the organization so that you can delegate control. If management of the materials will be more centralized, then a topical model may be more attractive. One other thing to consider is to leave some wiggle room. People will have new ideas, and the structure that you define today may have to adapt to notions you didn't think of on Day 1. You might want to go look at some running repositories and see if there are any good ideas you could use. http://www.dspace.org/whos-using-dspace/Repository-List.html You might want to start by setting up a test instance that you can play with, destroy and create afresh, and in which you can set up several different models to show to people and get their reactions and ideas. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [email protected] Asking whether markets are efficient is like asking whether people are smart.
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