[Dspace-general] [Dspace-tech] Week 4: Bitstream types

[Shane Beers]

DSpace is, honestly, not good at doing anything regarding audiovisual  
data types besides doing what it does with textual data - storing  
them, providing basic metadata, and allowing users to download them.  
While this is often good enough for textual data (combined with the  
indexing of the textual content), it's essentially useless for an a/v  
archive. There are a number of archival products both open source and  
commercial that handle image data (I know less about moving image  
data) in a far, far superior way to DSpace.

I do have to say that I don't necessarily look at this as a failure of  
DSpace in some way, as I don't think working with image data was even  
really considered in the design phase. However, no one working with a  
large collection of digital images would even begin to consider using  
DSpace as an archival platform unless they wanted to be continually  
frustrated and have none of the features that one desires when working  
with images, such as panning/zooming, photography-specific metadata,  
lightboxes, and so on.

I don't know if developers are at all interested in providing better  
support for a/v materials, as they would more-or-less have to  
duplicate the features of existing, successful (and frequently  
commercial) products (see ContentDM) to make me interested. I think it  
would certainly be an advantage and an improvement to DSpace, but I  
think there are certainly some higher priority improvements that need  
to take place on the textual document end.

Shane Beers
Digital Repository Services Librarian
George Mason University
sbeers at gmu.edu
http://mars.gmu.edu
703-993-3742



On Sep 8, 2008, at 9:24 AM, Dorothea Salo wrote:

> I know I'm seriously late on last week's chat summary; it's on my
> to-do list for today. Sorry about that!
>
> This week's question has to do with bitstreams. DSpace is designed
> around discrete papers contained within single bitstreams, and it also
> handles websites reasonably well. The question is: what else do you
> have, what have you done with/to DSpace to accommodate it, and what
> else do you need from DSpace?
>
> Bram de Luyten asks: "Would you recommend DSpace to an organization
> with needs to use it as a repository for very specific filetypes,
> different from standard documents (for example, audio or video
> repository ...) ? Why (not) ? And what if they want to store "many
> different things" ?"
>
> I'm feeling laissez-faire this week, and this is something of an
> additive question, so go ahead and read other folks' answers before
> adding your own.
>
> Dorothea
>
> -- 
> Dorothea Salo dsalo at library.wisc.edu
> Digital Repository Librarian AIM: mindsatuw
> University of Wisconsin
> Rm 218, Memorial Library
> (608) 262-5493
>
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