[SCC_Active_Members] Comments on DSpace as a candidate for CHM use

[H.M. Gladney]

Please do not forward this note outside the Computer History Museum and its
volunteer set.
 
    =============================
Early this year, I was puzzled by brief SCC discussions of the MIT/HP DSpace
open source institutional repository software offering.  That puzzlement
intensified two months ago when I reviewed a Digital Curation Center (Univ.
of Glasgow) chapter for the online digital curation "best practices" manual
it is building/sponsoring with U.K. governmental funding.
 
The author of that chapter is recommending two packages, DSpace and Fedora
(from Cornell Univ.), as I recall, without even mentioning the roughly 100
existing competitive packages.  When I asked his reason for the seeming
favoratism, he indicated that these packages were the only ones that had
support for digital preservation.
 
So I looked into DSpace in some detail, including sitting in on an
RLG-sponsored colloquium held in the Spring at Stanford Univ.--a colloquium
at which two papers were about D  Gross findings:
 
    (1) It is surprisingly difficult to determine from Web accessible
publications what DSpace actually provides, and what is vaporware.  I
therefore followed up with some e-mail correspondence with its principals:
Mackenzie Smith (MIT) and Robert Tansley (HP Labs).
 
    (2) Among institutional repository projects at universities, DSpace is
the leader in uptake.  However, whether this is because of the SW quality,
or because the DSpace team is by far the most effective at promoting its
work, is unclear to me.
 
    (3) Notwithstanding the DSpace team's emphasis on digital preservation
in its promotional descriptions, DSpace does not seem to have so far
implemented much more support for long-term preservation than other
institutional repository projects.
 
    (4) A bridge for exporting/importing collections from/to Greenstone
to/from DSpace is described in the latest D-Lib Magazine issue.  See
Witten, Ian H. David Bainbridge, Chi-Yu Huang and Katherine J. Don, and
Robert Tansley,  <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/witten/09witten.html>
StoneD: A Bridge between Greenstone and DSpace, D-Lib Magazine 11(9),
September 2005.  
 
    (4) The latest number of my Digital Document Newsletter (DDQ 4(3))
discusses these topics with reference to DSpace.  See
http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/ddq_4_3.htm.
 
Attached,here, FYI, is an excerpt from the most recent e-mail I have from
Robert Tansley:
 
"Most of our end users don't even know what provenance is.  In combination
with the fact our limited resources face an enormous number of other
technical and non-technical issues, we've had to limit our ourselves to
laying the groundwork which will enable future custodians to provide
provenance services in much the same way archivists do today (curators not
having had the luxury of being able to cryptographically sign physical
artefacts.)
 
"However, DSpace is an open source project.  If you feel DSpace needs work
in this area, please feel free to join our community, and contribute to
address the issue you describe.  This will benefit the huge number of users
of the "most widely used package among respondents to the Lynch/Lippincott
survey of U.S. institutional repositories"."
 
Best wishes, Henry
 
H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.      <http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/>
http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/     HMG Consulting
 
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