[Dspace-general] Questions Regarding Structure of DSpace

[Robert HW Wolfe]

Kevin,

The Metadata Services Unit in the MIT libraries recently completed a DSpace 
submission project for the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) that encountered 
the same organizational considerations that you're working through.  SMA 
wanted to submit articles from conference proceedings for the past three 
years.  Each conference was organized into five subject areas.  We made 
each subject area a collection and added each article to the appropriate 
collection as an item, capturing metadata at the level of 
organization.  The years are not architecturally distinct in this 
community, but the browse by date feature allows for date-based 
organizational views of the material.

I think of the differences between the files that comprise an item as being 
trivial.  The item is the conceptually unique object.  It doesn't make 
sense to me let papers expressing different ides be part of the same 
item.  Practically, search and discovery of articles that are files just 
doesn't work.  That being said I think that SMA, and likely your conference 
are what is intended as a community.  Which leaves us to fit the rest of 
the hierarchical levels of a community's objects into the one collection 
layer.  If you can, I recommend having a look at the SMA collection at 
MIT's DSpace, http://dspace.mit.edu/

Rob Wolfe
Metadata Specialist
MIT Libraries

At 05:02 PM 3/12/2004 -0500, Petsche, Kevin F wrote:
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>Good day!
>
>
>
>Our implementation of DSpace is currently in beta testing here at IUPUI 
>(<http://dspace.iupui.edu/>http://dspace.iupui.edu) and we are getting a 
>great response from some areas of the campus interested in placing 
>material in the repository.
>
>
>
>But I am concerned that I am not setting-up some of these communities and 
>collections in the best manner.
>
>
>
>Let me explain:
>
>
>
>A few units on campus are wishing to place conference proceedings for 
>several years into the repository and another campus-affiliated unit is 
>interested in pursuing the archiving of an electronic newsletter.  The 
>seriality of these projects are causing me to wonder what the best way to 
>implement these.  For example, there s a unit on campus called the Adult 
>Education Department .  The chair of the department is interested in using 
>DSpace as a repository and archive of the proceedings for an annual 
>conference that he s very much involved in, The Midwest 
>Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing and Community 
>Education .  It s a two-day conference and makes available several 
>conference papers each year.
>
>
>
>Knowing the structure of IDEA and the relationships among its components 
>(i.e. communities, collections, items and file), I wonder what the best 
>way to do the above tasks.
>
>
>
>My inclination is to make an Adult Education Department community, with a 
>Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference collection.  This then would seem 
>to make each year of the conference a separate item, with each paper a 
>separate file within each item (i.e. year).  But this gets to be quite 
>awkward.  Each of these implementers wants to give each contributor the 
>ability to submit their own paper, but my understanding is that this 
>requires each contributor to have update authorization which then gives 
>them the ability to delete papers and change the metadata.  Further, if 
>this is the set-up, I have concerns about the metadata description of each 
>file.  It seems to me that we can add a description.toc field to each 
>item, but these aren t searchable, are they?  Further, like any serial 
>record, there s only a very general ability to describe the item and not 
>particular topics that rest within each paper or article.  It doesn t seem 
>very satisfying.
>
>
>
>The other option that I ve contemplated is more satisfying.  It shifts the 
>structure upwards so that each paper or article is its own item with 
>accompanying metadata.  But then each conference or online newsletter must 
>be its own community with each issue being the collection.  This, it seems 
>to me, muddles the repository at the front end, as the list of communities 
>then becomes a mixture of campus departments, newsletters and 
>conferences.  Again, this seems to be a solution that is not very satisfying.
>
>
>
>Can anyone help me to solve my way through this?  I ve searched through 
>the online documentation and DSpace Federation site, but can t seem to put 
>my finger on the help I need.
>
>
>
>Thanks so much in advance!
>
>
>
>Kevin
>
>
>
>Kevin Petsche
>
>Assistant Librarian
>
>Electronic Journals Collection Manager
>
>Digital Libraries/Cataloging Teams
>
>IUPUI University Library UL1115D
>
>755 West Michigan Street
>
>Indianapolis, Indiana  46202
>
>317.278.2330
>
>317.278.0368 (fax)
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Dspace-general mailing list
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