[Dspace-general] Broad concept question

[Sean Thomas]

Hi Glenn,

I can tell you that I've been asked this same question many times having
previously worked for a library automation vendor that had both ILS and
repository solutions.  I think that a major cause of confusion is in 
looking at
repositories through the standpoint of the user interface.  I've often heard
that DC and qDC are inferior descriptive metadata schemes to MARC and, as far
as
linking to digital assests, they can do that through the 856 tag in the MARC
record.  Those are fine arguments but they're only related to a very small
aspect of what repositories do.  Repositories, at their core, are about
*managing* the digital assets.  To do this effectively, you need to consider
solutions that can support not just descriptive metadata to aid in end-user
discovery, but also technical and administrative metadata and that do 
this in a
structured, standardized way (such as in METS).  You want to consider 
solutions
that can aid in format recognition (e.g. JHOVE) and verification (e.g. MD5
checksum, SHA-1 hash) to ensure that these assets have not become corrupt and
in support of future format migration strategies.  While you can store all of
this technical data in MARC, even if it's in a 9xx field, you're going to have
to build customized solutions in the future to mine this data to use it in any
way.  All of this is necessary to begin building preservation strategies for
these digital assets.  While you could put your most valuable physical special
collections in the library stacks, you choose wisely to preserve them 
and house
them in secure, temperature and humidity controlled facilities.  Likewise with
digital assets, you could 'shoe-horn' the metadata that you need into 
MARC, but
you'd be better off in the long run to consider systems that are designed to
handle the existing and future needs for the preservation of these materials.

There are many other benefits to repositories of course, such as being 'format
agnostic' regarding what can be stored - not only relating to rich media, but
also to native descriptive metadata formats like EAD, TEI, and others which
loose their structure when mapped to MARC.  I could go on and on but,
hopefully, this will help with your struggle to convince your librarians to
start thinking outside of the MARC box.

Sean

--
Sean Thomas
DSpace Product Manager
MIT Libraries
sthomas at mit.edu





Quoting Glenn Bunton <gbunton at odu.edu>:

> If you will bear with me, I have a question only peripherally about Dspace
> but one I think this community can really help me with.
>
> I work in a general liberal arts university library so you know the
> environment from which this question arises. Obviously in such an
> environment the integrated online information system (online catalog) has
> been the pre-eminent information access and management system in use. While
> I don't know "real" numbers I suspect a significant, if not majority, of
> similar libraries hold the same perspective of the online catalog being, if
> not the be-all end-all information access system then at least being the
> focal point for everything the library provides.
>
> My question, then, is this. How does one answer the question of why
> something like Dspace (or any other repository or information management
> software) be used instead of just dumping everything into the online
> catalog? Catalogers, of course, argue they can put anything into MARC with
> a little effort and online catalog vendors are more than willing to sell
> all kinds of add-on modules for big bucks that supposed do everything.
>
> Thanks in advance for any ideas. I've been fighting this battle for years
> and have run out of ideas of my own.
>
> ==================================
> Mr. Glenn Bunton
> Head of Systems Development
> Old Dominion University Libraries
> Norfolk, Virginia 23529
> gbunton at odu.edu
> (757) 683-5952
> ===================================
>
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