DSpace Or How an Electronic Resource Management Enterprise

DSpace: Or How an Electronic Resource Management Enterprise at MIT Solved all the Problems of the Digital World. Butch Lazorchak CRADLE July 14, 2003

DSpace: What is it, exactly? l l l A Digital “Depository” A Digital “Repository” An Open Source Software Platform A Groundbreaking Digital Library System A Specialized Type of Digital Asset Management or Content Management System

Commercial Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS) l l l Documentum Media. Bin/Interwoven North Plains Systems-Telescope product Artesia Oracle Intermedia Lots of others…

Welcome to Acronymland! MITCET-MIT Council on Educational Technology OCW-Open Courseware DSpace-“digital space, ” “design space, ” “dissemination space” or some combination of all or none of those Invent@MIT, the HP-MIT Alliance (a joint venture) MIT Libraries operate DSpace at MIT

MIT libraries has a particular mission for the MIT instantiation: • to provide stable long-term storage to house the digital products of MIT faculty and researchers; • to provide long-term preservation for digital materials in a variety of formats, including text, audio, video, images, datasets and more; • and to enable remote access to those materials through one coherent interface.

l DSpace: What’s it look like?

Why is Dspace all the hype? • • • Complete, easy-to-read documentation, understandable by nontechnologists Standards-based (Dublin Core, XML, established/robust open source software), allowing it to easily co-exist with established/co -developing systems An implementation design plan that is easy to follow (even if earlier versions of the software were buggy) The design originated in the library system (as opposed to the CS department), emphasizing the importance of library considerations (and bolstering the techno-confidence of librarians everywhere) Sexiness of the name (relatively speaking), the MIT connection, the dollar power of HP, and first to market (of the research solutions? )

They’ve figured it all out: l l l l Complete digital asset management system Open source solution Support for long-term preservation All data types supported, including ones that haven’t even been invented yet Protects and guarantees the authenticity of the digital materials over time Bundles rights management information with each digital artifact Supports interoperability

DSpace: the elegant integration of user-centered and systemcentered capabilities l Users l Contributors l Researchers l End Users l Content and Services l Content Types l Submission Process l Technology

Who are These “Users” • Contributors l • Researchers l • MIT Faculty exclusively (at the moment) Federators (Columbia, Cornell, Ohio State, U’s of Rochester, Washington, Toronto) End Users l Everybody in the whole, wide world

Content and Services l Content Typesl Any kind of digital content imaginable l Long-term preservation support for the actual bits is guaranteed l Software types are maintained and supported through the use of a bitstream manager Submission Process l A Sharium! Decentralized submission process l Ingest process which incorporates human-edited and machineannotated processes l Provenance and authentication through the use of checksums l Handle System persistent identifiers l Rights management utilizing Creative Commons licenses

Technology l l Open Source-get it at Source. Forge Scalable-from your laptop to the mountaintop (as long as it’s a Unix-type environment) Dublin Core DC-LIB metadata schema, but SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in un. Like Environments) is on the way (http: //web. mit. edu/dspacedev/www/simile/) Interoperability (Semantic Web, OAI); Intelligent Agents; Complex metadata schemas

DSpace: Good l A Complete Scalable System l Providing for Long-term l ACCESS l PRESERVATION l AUTHENTICITY l RIGHTS MANAGEMENT l Outside of propriety constraints l And with a vision of how digital information can serve us in the future

Do you want to set up a DSpace system? It is important to note that the DSpace system operates entirely within the open-source software framework, freeing it from the encumbrances of proprietary software. The prerequisite software for DSpace includes a UNIX-like operating system (HP/UX, Linux, Solaris or Macintosh OS X), though the application itself is written in Java. The tested versions of the following software also required; Java 1. 3 or later; Tomcat 4. 0; Apache 1. 3; Ant 1. 4; and Postgre. SQL 7. 2. 3[i]. DSpace also utilizes Lucene, a Java freeware search engine, and the user interface Resin, a Java Servlet engine which also provides support for Java Server Pages. The user interface is entirely web-based at this time, which provides for very simple interaction with the system. In terms of hardware, DSpace has no specific requirements (the software is designed to run on everything from a laptop to an expensive server), but they do include general recommendations for a system designed for a research university: a reasonably good server (e. g. Sun Fire 280 R Server, two 900 Mhz Ultra. SPARC-III Cu processors, 8 MB Ecache, 2 GB memory, two 36 GB 10, 000 rpm HH internal FCAL disk drives, DVD) and a decent amount of disk storage (e. g. 436 -GB, or 12 x 26. 4 Gbyte 10 K RPM disks, Sun Stor. Edge A 1000 rackmountable w/1 HW RAID controller, 24 MB std cache). With tape backups and accessories the system above should cost around $30, 000. [ii] [i] "DSpace System Documentation: Operation, " http: //dspace. org/technology/systemdocs/operation. html (accessed 22 February 2003). [ii] "FAQ: DSpace: MIT Libraries, " http: //dspace. org/what/faq. html (accessed 22 February 2003).