Robert Tansley

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: 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.