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Hi Renata,<br><br>
I'm just back from a meeting in the UK organized by the DCC to discuss
this very question (among other things). Lots and lots of institutions
seem interested in doing this, but not many have actually begun... MIT
hasn't, but intends to this year. The problem is that right now all
DSpace does is archive the whole dataset with associated metadata, and
return *the whole thing* to researchers who want to do something with
it... there is no functionality to run complex queries on the data, do
data mining, etc. Looking at other scientific dbs like those run by
EMBL-EBI and NCBI, they tend to be optimized for the particular type of
data stored and the ways scientists work with that data... not easy to do
in a heterogenous digital archive system like DSpace. But if you can
accept minimal functionality that just supports discovery and citation of
the entire dataset, then it isn't difficult to archive them if you have
enough storage and bandwidth. This is widely felt to be better than
nothing, since a lot of this data is being lost now and has no central
archive like genbank to give it to. <br><br>
I also recommend looking at what Cambridge University is doing with small
molecule data in DSpace@Cambridge...
<a href="https://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/724" eudora="autourl">https://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/724</a>.<br>
If the data is encoded in xml and can be divided into individual small
items of data than you can do a bit more, and the information is included
in search engines like Google.<br><br>
I think a lot of people running DSpace would be interested in what you've
tried and how it's working out, if you're willing to share that
information on the list.<br><br>
Thanks,<br><br>
MacKenzie<br><br>
At 09:57 AM 10/3/2005 +0200, Renata Arovelius wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite><font face="Courier New, Courier" size=2>Hi,<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier" size=2>Does anyone have collections of
scientific datasets in a DSpace repository? What problems have you met
when you transferred databases into DSpace? We have tested 4 different
scientific dataset and I would like to exchange some ideas about how to
handle it.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier" size=2>Thanks!<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier" size=2>/Renata<br>
</font><font face="arial">_________________<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times">Renata Arovelius<br>
SLU (Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet)/<br>
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences<br>
Universitetsledningens kansli<br>
Rector Office<br>
Arrheniusplan 2
C
Tel: +46 18 671283<br>
P.O. Box
7070
Fax: +46 18 672000<br>
S-750 07 Uppsala<br><br>
e-post/E-mail: Renata.Arovelius@adm.slu.se<br>
<a href="http://www-jurdok.adm.slu.se/" eudora="autourl">http://www-jurdok.adm.slu.se/</a></font>
</blockquote>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
MacKenzie Smith<br>
Associate Director for Technology<br>
MIT Libraries<br>
Building E25-131d<br>
77 Massachusetts Avenue<br>
Cambridge, MA 02139<br>
(617)253-8184<br>
kenzie@mit.edu</body>
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