[Dspace-general] Summary of March 2004 DSpace user group outcomes

[MacKenzie Smith]

Greetings all,

At the close of the very successful first meeting of the DSpace user 
community last week, I promised to send out a summary of the major 
outcomes. A more thorough summary of the meeting will follow, and we are 
hard at work to get all the presentations and other material up on the 
DSpace Federation website just as quickly as we can.  Thanks again to 
everyone who presented at the meeting and provided us with such interesting 
topics for discussion.

Summary:

-- The DSpace platform is being put to a variety of uses, primarily to 
create institutional repositories of research publications and other 
material, but also for other applications (e-thesis repositories, learning 
object repositories, e-journal publishing, cultural material collections, 
electronic records management, and so on). Its utility lies in its focus on 
making content accessible (findable, retrievable) and preserving it over 
time, and those two things should remain its primary focus going forward, 
along with developing and perpetuating standards for information and 
digital object models. There was general validation of a proposed new 2.0 
architecture which is more modular and has a more formal API structure that 
allows other, more context-specific applications to be built on top of DSpace.

-- The DSpace Federation is now open to all. Anyone can join, everyone can 
contribute. There are many ways to contribute:
         -- become part of the DSpace developer community. We will soon be 
establishing a group of system architects and developers to share ongoing 
responsibility for designing, maintaining, and enhancing the DSpace system 
-- participation is welcome from any institution, and the exact criteria 
and process for joining the group will be established shortly by a seed 
group of 5-6 developers from different organizations using DSpace now. More 
on this soon.
         -- if you can't contribute programming, there's still lots to do, 
including: testing and debugging the system (including supplying patches), 
writing and reviewing documentation, and providing domain expertise to 
inform functionality that the system should implement (for example, by 
participating in one of the new SIGs described below). We'll work with the 
community to establish channels for all these activities within the DSpace 
Federation framework.

-- It's time to start thinking about the long-term governance of DSpace 
outside of MIT or HP (e.g. the social, legal, political, economic, policy, 
and organizational aspects). We should look at other open source software 
governance models (e.g. Apache Foundation, Global Grid Forum, W3C, etc.) 
and develop a plan either to create a new non-profit organization for this 
purpose, or join an existing one. We should explore various models and 
policies for transfer of intellectual property - for example, copyright and 
licensing of code, and the DSpace trademark - to this organization, so that 
it can be established in such a way that an initial contribution of DSpace 
IP from MIT and HP is tenable, and so that academic and commercial 
institutions will be willing to contribute additional IP in the future. As 
a first step towards this, the current mailing lists and other DSpace 
Federation services will migrate over to the dspace.org domain from its 
current home in the mit.edu domain. Work on the DSpace platform and related 
efforts will continue unabated while this entity is being established under 
the current, informal governance model.

-- Institutional Repositories are a high-value, long-term vision, but are 
still very much works in progress. We need to continue to collaborate on 
how best to build them, by sharing information about advocacy, marketing, 
assessment, policies, business plans, and a myriad of other issues that 
help us understand how institutional repositories will work to best 
advantage. Since these issues go beyond the DSpace platform to include 
other organizations, platforms, and views on access and preservation, we 
need to establish another, more inclusive community with which to 
collaborate. This community would include DSpace users but not exclusively. 
SPARC (and possibly other organizations) will be approached to help create 
this forum, and the DSpace-based institutional repository implementors will 
help in whatever way we can.

-- The DSpace Federation will continue to foster new and innnovative uses 
of the DSpace platform by creating a set of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) 
who can discuss the necessary features and functions of particular 
applications of the platform. A preliminary list of these might include: 
institutional repositories, e-thesis repositories, learning object 
repositories, records managements systems, and publishing systems (open 
access or other). These will be hosted on the dspace.org website and will 
be open to all. Institutions using DSpace will ensure that they have 
cross-representation on these groups and the developers groups so that 
useful features and functions specified by SIGs are successfully implemented.

The feedback we've gotten about the value of the meeting to the DSpace 
community was clear: it was very useful!  We at MIT certainly found it so, 
and hope to keep working with you for a long time to come. Thanks again to 
everyone who attended the meeting and made it so productive and lively. We 
hope we'll get an opportunity to do it again!



MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-308
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu