[Dspace-general] Week 3: Good Repository Software

[Mark H. Wood]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 10:03:37AM -0400, wally grotophorst wrote:
> -- a way to address an individual bitstream--one that used the handle to 
> resolve the hostname.   I'd really like to be able to use other systems 
> for display and have DSpace focus on maintaining the bitstreams.

Yes!  No matter how nice we make the DSpace UI, it should be thought
of as the default.  What makes information powerful is linking it
together, and there are lots of ways to do that.  HTML is good at
linking, not so good (in practice) at capturing the many dimensions of
knowledge.  Repo.s are good at capturing metadata but haven't been so
good at linking.  Can we do better?
 
> -- a quicker way to add content.  The simple "upload your stuff' way 
> that Flickr takes in a digital image and offers a few fields for 
> user-supplied metadata could be a big help in getting 
> faculty/researchers to add content.   This content could go into some 
> sort of "holding area" for review and post-upload editing, of course. 
> The design goal would be to help end users bypass the current 
> click-happy series of add-an-item pages.

What about making a subset of available fields part of the user
profile?  "I'm willing to supply these fields."

Of course, if people uncheck everything, then submission is easy, but
OTOH why not just use WebDAV and forget about metadata?  I suppose
this means configuring what can be unchecked.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

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