[Dspace-general] Persistent Bitstream IDs - Call For Discussion

[JQ Johnson]

Overall, I do not believe that persistent bitstream IDs are a good idea.
However, the question of persistent IDs reminds me of a closely related
question, how to provide multiple revisions of an item in the DSpace
context.

Our faculty seem likely to use DSpace heavily as a repository for
working papers.  Such working papers have a short useful life, and are
replaced by new versions fairly rapidly.  How would one handle such
versions in DSpace?  The easiest option is separate items for each
version, but then there's no automatic version control or tracking of
the connections between versions (no "previous version" metadata, etc.).
Another option would be to treat all versions as a single item, with
different versions appearing as additional bitstreams.  This has the
advantage of preserving the connections between the versions, but would
require implementation changes to allow bitstream additions by item
owners and to provide a small amount of additional per-bitstream
metadata (the version info; currently the only significant per-bitstream
metadata is the filename).

This issue is connected with the problem of persistent bitstream IDs.
If we were to have multiple versions in the same item, then we'd
certainly want persistent IDs at the bitstream level.  Conversely,
persistent bitstream IDs would encourage a future evolution of DSpace
into making bitstreams first class citizens with more of their own
metadata.

However, I think that the key issue that should drive this discussion is
"what do the faculty want?"  I agree with Harnad that the major problem
for institutional repositories is getting faculty to contribute.  If
real faculty care about PURLs and such (I don't think they do, by the
way), then that should be the key desideratum.

JQ Johnson                    	Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator	e-mail: jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
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