MacKenzie Smith

DSpace as an Open Archival Information System: Current Status and Future Directions

As more and more output from research institutions is born digital, a means for capturing and preserving the results of this investment is required. To begin to understand and address the problems surrounding this task, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories collaborated with MIT Libraries over two years to develop DSpace, an open source institutional repository software system. This paper describes DSpace in the context of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model. Particular attention is given to the preservation aspects of DSpace, and the current status of the DSpace system with respect to addressing these aspects. The reasons for various design decisions and trade-offs that were necessary to develop the system in a timely manner are given, and directions for future development are explored. While DSpace is not yet a complete solution to the problem of preserving digital research output, it is a production-capable system, represents a significant step forward, and is an excellent platform for future research and development.

The DSpace open source digital asset management system: challenges and opportunities

Last year at the ECDL 2004 conference, we reported some initial progress and experiences developing DSpace as an open source community-driven project [8], particularly as seen from an institutional managers viewpoint. We also described some challenges and issues. This paper describes the progress in addressing some of those issues, and developments in the DSpace open source community. We go into detail about the processes and infrastructure we have developed around the DSpace code base, in the hope that this will be useful to other projects and organisations exploring the possibilities of becoming involved in or transitioning to open source development of digital library software. Some new challenges the DSpace community faces, particularly in the area of addressing required system architecture changes, are introduced. We also describe some exciting new possibilities that open source development brings to our community.

DSpace: An Institutional Repository from the MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard Laboratories

The DSpace? project of the MIT Libraries and the Hewlett Packard Laboratories has built an institutional repository system for digital research material. This paper will describe the rationale for institutional repositories, the DSpace system, and its implementation at MIT. Also described are the plans for making DSpace open source in an effort to provide a useful test bed and a platform for future research in the areas of open scholarly communication and the long-term preservation of fragile digital research material.

Digital Archive Policies and Trusted Digital Repositories

The MIT Libraries, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the University of California San Diego Libraries are conducting the PLEDGE Project to determine the set of policies that affect operational digital preservation archives and to develop standardized means of recording and enforcing them using rules engines. This has the potential to allow for automated assessment of “trustworthiness” of digital preservation archives. We are also evaluating the completeness of other efforts to define policies for digital preservation such as the RLG/NARA Trusted Digital Repository checklist and the PREMIS metadata schema. We present our results to date.

Exploring Variety in Digital Collections and the Implications for Digital Preservation

The amount of digital content produced at academic research institutions is large, and libraries and archives at these institutions have a responsibility to bring this digital material under curatorial control in order to manage and preserve it over time. But this is a daunting task with few proven models, requiring new technology, policies, procedures, core staff competencies, and cost models. The MIT Libraries are working with the DSpace™ open-source digital repository platform to explore the problem of capturing research and teaching material in any digital format and preserving it over time. By collaborating on this problem with other research institutions using the DSpace platform in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and other parts of the world, as well as with other important efforts in the digital preservation arena, we are beginning to see ways of managing arbitrary digital content that might make digital preservation an achievable goal.

DSpace: A Year in the Life of an Open Source Digital Repository System

The DSpaceTM digital repository system was released as open source software in November of 2002. In the year since then it has been adopted by a large number of research universities and other organizations world-wide that need a digital repository solution for a number of content types: research articles, gray literature, e-theses, cultural materials, scientific datasets, institutional records, educational materials, and more. The DSpace platform and its various applications are becoming better understood with experience and time. As one result of a recent meeting of the DSpace user community, we are now venturing into the territory of broad, community-based open source development and management, and gaining insights from the experience of the Apache Foundation, Global Grid Forum, and other successful open source projects about how to build open source software for the digital library domain.

MIT's CWSpace project: packaging metadata for archiving educational content in DSpace

This paper describes work in progress on the research project CWSpace, sponsored by the MIT and Microsoft Research iCampus program, to investigate the metadata standards and protocols required to archive the course materials found in MITs OpenCourseWare (OCW) into MITs institutional repository DSpace. The project goal is “to harvest and digitally archive OCW learning objects, and make them available to learning management systems by using Web Services interfaces on top of DSpace.” The larger vision is one of complex digital objects (CDOs) successfully interoperating amongst MITs various learning management systems and learning object repositories, providing archival preservation and persistent identifiers for educational materials, as well as providing the means to richer shared discovery and dissemination mechanisms for those materials. The paper describes work to date on the analysis of the content packaging metadata standards METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) and especially IMS-CP (IMS Global Learning Consortium, Content Packaging), and issues faced in the development and use of profiles, extensions, and external schema for these standards. Also addressed are the anticipated issues in the preparation of transformations from one standard to another, noting the importance of well-defined profiles to making that feasible. The paper also briefly touches on the DSpace development work that will be undertaken to provide new import and export functionalities, as the technical specifications for these will largely be determined by the packaging metadata profiles that are developed. Note that the degree of interoperability considered herein might be referred to as “first level,” as this paper addresses the packaging metadata only, which in turn is the carrier or envelope for the descriptive (and other kinds of) metadata. It will no doubt be an even more challenging task to ensure interoperability at what might be referred to as the “second level,” that of semantic metadata.

Eternal bits [digital files preservation]

The MIT Libraries is addressing the problem of maintaining and sharing digital content over the long haul with a project called DSpace. For this digital repository, a simple, open-source software application was built that not only accepts digital materials and makes them available on the Web but also puts them into a data management regime that helps to preserve them for generations to come. Other organizations worldwide have begun similar efforts including Cornell University, and the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge. DSpace has a growing group of committed programmers distributed across the globe who continually maintain and improve it.

What Motivates Authors of Scholarly Articles? The Importance of Journal Attributes and Potential Audience on Publication Choice

In this article we examine what motivations influence academic authors in selecting a journal in which to publish. A survey was sent to approximately 15,000 faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers at four large North American research universities with a response rate of 14.4% (n = 2021). Respondents were asked to rate how eight different journal attributes and five different audiences influence their choice of publication output. Within the sample, the most highly rated attributes are quality and reputation of journal and fit with the scope of the journal; open access is the least important attribute. Researchers at other research-intensive institutions are considered the most important audience, while the general public is the least important. There are significant differences across subject disciplines and position types. Our findings have implications for understanding the adoption of open access publishing models.

Communicating with data: new roles for scientists, publishers and librarians

Much has been published in the past ten years about the explosion of research data in almost every academic field and particularly science, as evidenced by the growth of new computational research disciplines that generate and consume petabytes of data. Research data in the context discussed here includes many varieties: observational and experimental data, statistical models and simulations, still and moving images, three-dimensional models, compilations of multimedia files, and so on. Often research data is aggregated into databases to support queries and analysis, visualizations and other types of post-processing. The scale of data sets ranges from small spreadsheets collected by individual researchers to multi-terabyte files containing high-resolution climate model runs, genome-wide association studies, or large functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging experiments.1 Over the past thirty-odd years the growth of computational science and high-performance computing has raised the stakes for data-intensive research to new levels.2 That trend, combined with increasing pressure from government and other research funders to make the products of their funding more accessible to other researchers and the public, have increased expectations that researchers should freely share their research data and ensure its preservation for future uses not necessarily envisioned by its originator. With this new expectation, research data becomes another mode of scholarly communication alongside books, articles, conference proceedings, etc., taking its place as part of the scholarly record with all that that implies. However, research data is often unlike the static publications we normally think of as scholarly communication. Data does not lend itself to neat, well-defined packaging, it can grow and change over time, and it develops complex relationships to other data. A few examples of current attempts to elevate data to a useful mode of scholarly communication include: Linked Open Data,3 the Concept Web Alliance’s ‘nano-publications’,4 and experiments with ‘dataenhanced PDFs’.5 But whether data proves to be a separate communication channel or part of an integrated fabric of channels, it will require very different technologies, policies and services to manage it over time. Preserving the literature entails keeping print copies in safe place or standardizing digital text encoding to make it possible to migrate its encoding over time. Preserving digital data is much more complicated since there is no equivalent of ‘text’. But if scholarship is changing to include primary data as a new mode of communication, this raises the question about the roles of traditional players in scholarly communication, namely researchers, scholarly societies, publishers, and libraries. How will these roles change to respond to data publishing? Of course, researchers have always generated data in the course of their work, and often reused that data themselves or aggregated it with additional data to support further research. There has also been a presumption by the research community that data would be made available on request from its creator, for example to validate research results. Most researchers have kept their data around for as long as they felt it had continuing value, but have done so in ad hoc ways with mixed success. A small number of disciplines have developed very sophisticated infrastructure for managing research data: high-energy Communicating with data: new roles for scientists, publishers and librarians 203