[Dspace-general] [Fwd: Re: Week 3: Good Repository Software]

[Elin Stangeland]

Hi everyone,

A belated addition to last week’s discussion, I hope that’s ok. First of
all can I just start by saying thank you Dorothea for taking the
responsibility of managing this process? Very useful for me in a little
exercise I'm doing here in Cambridge, secondly you seem to succeed in
getting at least some of our Repository manager colleagues out there to
speak, which is great! Also Dorothea, many of the issues you describe
are problems we struggle with here in Cambridge as well.

You ask me to define what I think is good repository software. Here are
some of the things that would be on the top of my list of what I would
like to see in good repository software (and which DSpace doesn't yet do):

- Flexibility in managing and describing objects in the repository (an
object can be a community, collection, item or bitstream) and in
expressing the relationships between these. For example I would like to
be able to define on ingest (and later on as well) which collections an
item should belong to (and yes I have used the mapping tool, but it is
rather clunky), or whether a collection related to one community also
should be listed as part of another. If the content I deposit is
“related” to another item somehow I would like to be able to express
this as well.

- The option to (easily) plug in to whatever external sources of content
and or metadata I can find which would then let me pull this content to
DSpace at Cambridge. For example it would be great if a researcher wanting
to deposit an article could pull the content and the author’s final
version from Nature or indeed push it from Nature’s own author interface
(as suggested recently by Nature publishing). If I on top of that were
able to integrate easy access to for example the Sherpa tools giving
advice on copyright and funder mandates I’d be very happy. Or perhaps we
need to make external interfaces for doing all of this and use SWORD or
similar technologies to make sure that the content ends up in the IR?

- Also (and this is where I become DSpace specific) I would like to be
able to manage submission forms, make decisions on what metadata is
being indexed, what browse indexes to generate etc. from the DSpace
front end administration not various text files that my technical staff
would then have to spend time on deploying for me.

That's all for now!

Best regards,
Elin

____________________________________________________

Elin Stangeland
DSpace at Cambridge Repository Manager
Cambridge University Library
West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DR
tel. 01223 333 130
e-mail: es444 at cam.ac.uk
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk
____________________________________________________



-- 
____________________________________________________

Elin Stangeland
DSpace at Cambridge Repository Manager
Cambridge University Library
West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DR
tel. 01223 333 130
e-mail: es444 at cam.ac.uk
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk
____________________________________________________