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DSpace Newsletter - Spring 2002

MacKenzie Smith Joins MIT Libraries & DSpace Team

We are very pleased to announce the arrival of MacKenzie Smith in the position of Associate Director for Technology at MIT Libraries. In this position she has overall responsibility for the DSpace project as well as other technology initiatives of the Libraries. Formerly MacKenzie was the Digital Library Program Manager at the Harvard University Library's Office for Information Systems where she managed the design and implementation of the Library Digital Initiative. Prior to that she worked in various capacities in the Harvard Library's systems office, and in the Library Systems Office at the University of Chicago. Her background is in applied technology in libraries and academia, and she holds a MA in Library and Information Science from the University of Chicago as well as a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington.

DSpace in Beta-testing with Early Adopters

DSpace has reached a milestone in its two-year development project with the commencement of our beta-testing period. We are working with four MIT early adopter communities to gain an understanding of how contributors will use the system and what features they find most useful. Data collected during this "Early Adopter" phase also will help the DSpace business team predict costs and develop a business plan for long-term operation of the repository.

The four participating communities are the Sloan School of Management; the Department of Ocean Engineering; the Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development; and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Selected to reflect different types of MIT organizational units representing a variety of user needs, the Early Adopters will submit digital items to collections within their own "communities" and will provide feedback to the Dspace team.

Early Adopters

Sloan School, the largest community to have an early presence in DSpace, will submit the "Sloan School Working Papers" as its first DSpace digital collection. DSpace also will be integrated with the SloanSpace portal and collaborative system to capture working papers directly as they are completed in that system.

For the Department of Ocean Engineering, the amount of data collected and processed daily in the field of ocean sciences, engineering and management is vast and is expected to increase considerably in the future. A reliable digital repository is a promising solution to storing and making available this material, which is produced in a variety of digital formats.

The DSpace coordinators for the Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development (CTPID) are working with their 10 member programs to develop web materials appropriate for each groups' distinct mission. Issues for the team include access policies, easy document submission, and organizing intellectual work not associated with an existing CTPID program.

The Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) is currently converting its collection of more than 1,500 technical reports from print to digital files. These will form the largest initial collection of items in DSpace, and will be supplemented continually with new reports.

Additional Content to be Batch Loaded

  • Over 100 MIT Press out-of-print books in digital form have been added to DSpace. By tracking usage statistics MIT Press will be able to determine the level of interest that exists for these books.
  • The MIT digital collection of technical reports from the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL) project, an earlier effort of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, will be added to DSpace this summer.

Design Documents

Two new documents describing the functionality and architecture of the "early adopter version" of DSpace are now available on our website at http://web.mit.edu/dspace/live/implementation/design_documents/

Opportunities to See DSpace

JCDL 2002, Portland, OR; July 15, 2002
ACS National Meeting,CINF Digital Archiving Symposium, Boston, MA; August 18-22, 2002
ASIS&T Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA; Nov. 18-21, 2002

For more information about DSpace contact dspace-info@mit.edu

 

 


  


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