I cheated too...and Dorothea's right. DSpace, for all the many things it does well, really isn't yet a great end-to-end solution if you're actually running a digital repository. Stretch the system to store digital objects other than open-access offprints and it begins to feel unnecessarily cramped. I first got a copy of DSpace up and running in 2003. At the time I thought it was a lot more trouble than it should have been but understood that I didn't know all that much about Tomcat, JSPs or Postgres. Here in 2008, I still don't know a lot about Java and JSPs but I now realize that not all that many other people around the library world do either. When I see how little actual "work" DSpace does (I mean, we're not talking about a transaction-based, real-time processing sort of system), why such a complex codebase? Sure, a certain amount of over-engineering seems to accompany software projects that begin life in the library but on some level it does seem to end up strangling innovation...
I suspect that if the original development team had decided to code the thing in PHP with a MySQL database, we'd be much further along in terms of user-contributed code enhancement (think WordPress). Of course, if like my toaster it did everything I asked, I wouldn't much care what the code looked like or why/how it worked. So complaining about the platform's code is my way of saying there are things that I'd like to fix if I could. Absent a rewrite of the code, I think these specific things would help: -- a way to address an individual bitstream--one that used the handle to resolve the hostname. I'd really like to be able to use other systems for display and have DSpace focus on maintaining the bitstreams. -- a quicker way to add content. The simple "upload your stuff' way that Flickr takes in a digital image and offers a few fields for user-supplied metadata could be a big help in getting faculty/researchers to add content. This content could go into some sort of "holding area" for review and post-upload editing, of course. The design goal would be to help end users bypass the current click-happy series of add-an-item pages. -- in the absence of deleting content, some way to handle versioning of documents -- a way to "hide" content (and associated metadata) on both the item level and the collection level. Wally Wally Grotophorst Associate University Librarian Digital Programs and Systems University Libraries George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia 22030 (703) 993-9005 _______________________________________________ Dspace-general mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general
