[Dspace-general] Questions Regarding Structure of DSpace

Mon Mar 15 16:49:37 EST 2004

Rob and Mick

Thanks for your responses to my message.  Regarding the "arbitrary hierarchies", is there any documentation (txt, ppt, or anything else?) that could be sent out describing this a bit more? 

Thanks again!

Kevin

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: Bass, Mick [mailto:mick.bass at hp.com] 
	Sent: Fri 3/12/2004 5:42 PM 
	To: Robert HW Wolfe; Petsche, Kevin F; dspace-general at mit.edu 
	Cc: 
	Subject: RE: [Dspace-general] Questions Regarding Structure of DSpace

	Rob Wolfe writes:
	> 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.  

	The capability to create arbitrary hierarchies of communities in DSpace 1.2 (beta testers testing soon, release circa April?) should go a long way to addressing this issue.  Rob Tansley demonstrated this capability at the DSpace users group meeting (yesterday!)

	- Mick

	====
	Mick Bass

	970.898.6788 office    408.216.0584 fax
	617.899.3938 mobile    303.494.5202 residence
	bass at alum.mit.edu      mick_bass at hp.com
	====

		-----Original Message-----
		From: dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of Robert HW Wolfe
		Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 3:33 PM
		To: Petsche, Kevin F; dspace-general at mit.edu
		Subject: Re: [Dspace-general] Questions Regarding Structure of DSpace

		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:

			content-class: urn:content-classes:message
			Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
			        boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C4087D.B946CA32"

			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
			Dspace-general at mit.edu
			http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general