[Dspace-general] DSpace Archiving

[MacKenzie Smith]

Scott,

I notice that an entire month has passed since you posted this question
so you've no doubt found your answer and moved on, but here is our
thinking on it...

Depositors (i.e. Dr Smith) should not be allowed to replace or delete
submissions, period. A system manager should be authorized to do
that, and Dr Smith is welcome to give her a call to make it happen.
But I presume you have policies for submission and retention of
deposited items, so the idea is to stick to them... the only reason
we would delete an item from our DSpace is if there were some
serious error (deliberate or not), plagiarism, or other legal challenge.
Otherwise we would "suppress" it from public display but hang onto it.

There are many variations on these policies, of course, but allowing
users to delete stuff from a preservation archive just doesn't strike
me as a good idea...

MacKenzie


At 04:40 PM 1/4/2006 -0500, Scott P. Muir wrote:
>I am envisioning the following situation
>
>In May Dr. Smith enters a document into the DSpace repository.  Over
>the next few days through a series of edits, Dr. Smith accidentally
>deletes the document out of DSpace, but isn't aware of the
>mishap.  Dr. Smith then leaves for the summer.  In September, Dr.
>Smith comes back, tries to look at the document and discovers it is
>not there.  Dr. Smith then calls the library demanding to know what
>happened, and informing the library that the missing document was the
>only copy.  Another scenario could have a document become corrupted
>through some bad editing, e.g. poor use of find/replace.
>
>We are exploring this on two tracks:  1- not letting anyone, but a
>very few defined number of people, delete or replace documents once
>they are in the repository or 2) developing a comprehensive long term
>strategy for retention of backups of the documents, etc, in DSpace so
>that we could restore a document.
>
>Has anyone else discussed this and come up with what you feel is an
>appropriate solution?
>
>Thanks for the input.
>
>Scott P Muir
>Associate University Librarian
>Bruce T. Halle Library, Room 200F
>Eastern Michigan University
>955 West Circle Drive
>Ypsilanti, MI  48197-2207

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building E25-131d
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu