Challenges

DSpace provides many challenges in the technical arena. The DSpace team is well positioned to advance the state of the art in several areas:

Metadata

DSpace must incorporate, index, and search items from diverse collections in diverse formats. It must deal with standard vocabularies from many different fields of study. It must include metadata regarding digital object structure, administration, and content.

Rights Management

DSpace must allow users to easily and flexibly control who can contribute, access, and update the digital objects that it contains. DSpace must support commerce on at least a subset of its contents. In some cases DSpace may require fine-grained rights management, for example, to allow free access to an article's abstract but restriced access to its entirety.

Community Architectures

DSpace is intended to preserve and distribute knowledge, and to promote ongoing work and learning in the various fields of study that contribute to it. As such, various means of building and nurturing communities of interest within DSpace will be critical.

Integration

DSpace must be a flexible and extensible system, which integrates components from many disciplines to achieve its overall objective of furthering the preservation and dissemination of knowledge.

Longevity

DSpace must provide long-term accessibility to items that its users submit. As format standards evolve, DSpace must provide mechanisms for migration from obsolete or unusable formats. DSpace must develop a business model that supports its longevity objectives.

Scalability

DSpace must be able to accomodate and preserve thousands of submissions each year, and will grow to hundreds of thousands of objects and terabytes of data. DSpace should support distinct or shared implementations at multiple institutions, and allow distinct DSpace implementations to federate themselves to provide access across shared collections.

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