[Dspace-general] Happy Birthday DSpace!

[Tansley, Robert]

All,

On 4 November 2002, HP Labs and MIT Libraries released DSpace 1.0 to an
unsuspecting public.  Back then, DSpace's team and usage were rather
humble -- one deployment at one university, backed by a team of around
7.

The vision was to build a simple end-to-end solution to enable
institutions to starting capturing the valuable digital assets produced
by their faculty, and to build a community of peers around it to start
attacking the enormous technical and non-technical challenges that would
doubtless prove too daunting for a single organisation to take on alone.

Today, on DSpace's third birthday, I think we can comfortably say that
vision is being fulfilled, and then some.  The DSpace software has been
downloaded 32,000 times; is used in over 30 countries spanning every
continent; contains contributions from over 50 developers from a variety
of organisations; is the nucleus of numerous research projects; has
prompted wide debate and deliberation on fundamental ideas about how an
institution thinks of its intellectual output; and has helped well over
a hundred universities and other organisations capture, preserve and
disseminate countless thousands of digital assets.

Particularly exciting recent developments are the emergence of
commercial service providers offering DSpace set-up, consultation,
customisation and hosting services; and the increasing use of DSpace
outside the realm of institutional repositories, such as in digital
museums and government organisations, which show that DSpace has grown
far beyond its roots.

DSpace has come a long way in just three years; let's see where the next
three take us!

Happy birthday DSpace!

 Robert TANSLEY / Digital Media Systems Programme / HP Labs
  http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Robert_Tansley/