[Dspace-general] Week 4: Bitstream types (Dorothea Salo)

[Mark H. Wood]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 03:13:06PM +0100, Tom De Mulder wrote:
> As far as I know, noone invented a long-term storage solution for general 
> digital content, including images, audio, video and scientific and medical 
> data. This generic data often ties together closely to papers also deposited 
> in a repository. As such it makes sense to store it all together.

No one has invented a long-term storage solution for *anything*.  When
it exists, it'll exist equally for all content, because in the storage
layer content is content -- it doesn't matter what is represented
therein.

Way up in the presentation layer, there are other considerations, such
as telling the user's browser what kind of content we think this bit is,
migrating formats as the winds of fashion wobble, facilitating
relationships among bitstreams, and so on.

> We have quite a lot of all types of content, and have already had to bash 
> the DSpace software hard (the thumbnails in particular were implemented in 
> an atrociously inefficient way) to make it work. But we need it to work, 
> because a large part of our remit is digital preservation.

I think I don't quite understand what is meant by "preservation"
here.  What's the connection between thumbnails and preservation, for
instance?

>> sorters, etc.  As somebody invented DSpace.  What we need is to bolt
>> them all to a well-designed panel and invent the wiring that connects
>> them.  The panel becomes The Machine, and all the various sub-machines
>> disappear behind it, although they still exist as discrete components
>> that can be replaced individually as needed.
>
> I can only assume that you haven't tried to bolt much into DSpace.

Why do you think DSpace is the panel?  I think the browser is the panel.

-- 
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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