[SCC_Active_Members] SCC Deliverables and choice of a SW base for the CHM repository

[H.M. Gladney]

This note expands on comments I made in the most recent SCC meeting.  Since
I do not yet have sufficient access to the SCC e-mail listserv, please
forward this note to the committee.

It seems to me that the choice of SW base for the future CHM digital
repository is among the most important decisions that the SCC should
influence, because it has service and cost implications for the next decade
or so.  If you agree with this assessment, you will also agree that several
stages of this choice and its implementation should be part of an SCC
deliverables plan.

As I emphasized in the meeting, we should consider Greenstone, Fedora, and
perhaps other offerings (including commercial offerings) in addition to
Dspace (which I now understand was put forward by Lee C. only as an example)
as starting points.  I remind you that the choice is quite complex and that
there is a great deal of publicly available literature that bears on
it--more literature than any small group is likely to consider carefully.  I
promised to suggest some of that for SCC consideration.

The choice and implementation will probably take 1-2 years, depending both
on the sense of urgency among competing topics for SCC attention and
decisions about how much care the pending decisions merit.  An implication
is that other SCC activities should not wait for the choice or be viewed as
making the choice urgent.  This in turn implies that the format and metadata
for holdings collected before the repository base is available for service
need to be considered interim, with augmentation and conversion probably
being required for each such holding at a later date.  In the near future we
can probably specify much of what what will make the future conversions easy
and unlikely to cause troublesome errors.

I hope that by tomorrow I can deliver the promised bibliography about
Dspace, Fedora, and Greenstone, with adventitious additions related to the
pending choice of a repository SW base. 

Regards, Henry

H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.   HMG Consulting
http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/  1(408)867-5454 Saratoga, California 95070