DSpace Newsletter - Spring, 2001
New Staff
Robert Tansley joined the DSpace
Project Team in December as a Developer, and is currently located at HP
Labs in Bristol,England. Robert completed a PhD in the application of
semiology to multimedia information at the University of Southampton in
2000. During his time at Southampton, he also designed and implemented
the Eprints open source preprint and reprint archive software, currently
in use at Southampton as a cognitive sciences repository (CogPrints),
and by the University of California eScholarship programme, amongst others.
He was also involved in the specification and alpha-testing of the Open
Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocol. During his spare time,
Robert enjoys music, film and travel.
User Needs Assessment End Users
- MIT Faculty & Researchers - An online survey to determine content
contributor preferences for submission features is underway at http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?95RGYSL5N2JSYG6H0DCV8SBV
. All MIT faculty and researchers are encouraged to fill out this
short survey. (Both of these surveys can be reached through links
on our website, http://web.mit.edu/dspace )
- Subspace Administrators - All departments, labs and centers that
have expressed an interest in becoming a subspace of DSpace are being
interviewed by Margret Branschofsky to discuss their needs and preferences.
Please contact her if you would like to participate - margretb@mit.edu,
253-1293. (You don't have to be an early adopter to do this.)
Technical Accomplishments
- "Little D", the proof-of-concept pilot system that tests basic design
and tools, is a resounding success thanks to the efforts of developers
David Stuve and Peter Breton. Building upon this success, DSpace is
now releasing updates to the software on a 3-week development cycle
schedule.
- In December DSpace hosted an Architecture Review to get feedback
on the proposed design and architecture of DSpace. Experts and interested
parties from Hewlett-Packard Co., MIT, Harvard University and Tufts
University attended. · http://www.dspace.org is now active.
- Version control software, CVS, has been installed on our server.
· All hardware has been received and installed in MIT's Data Center,
Building W91, and the prototype implementations are running on it.
- DSpace is now registered on SourceForge, the open source developers'
site. User Interface A worldwide team, including designers Linda Godwin
and Susan Greenspan in Oregon and developer Robert Tansley in England,
is collaborating with members of the team in Massachusetts to design
the user interface for DSpace. Usability tests of these pages will
be held in April on the MIT campus. Anyone interested in participating
as a tester, please contact Margret Branschofsky at margretb@mit.edu
or 253-1293.
Policy
The DSpace Advisory Board has been formed and held its
first meeting in December.
Members include: Anne Beamish, Erik Brynjolfsson, James
Buzard, Eric Celeste, Catherine Friedman, Jerome Friedman, John Lienhard,
Gareth McKinley, William Mitchell, Jerry Saltzer, Richard Schmalensee,
Robert Stalnaker, Bruce Tidor, Ann Wolpert.
Public Relations
- Mick Bass, Project Leader, gave a presentation about DSpace to the
MIT Technology & Policy Program in December. He repeated this presentation
for MIT Libraries staff in January.
- Margret Branschofsky gave a presentation about DSpace to MIT students
and staff during MIT's Independent Activities Period in January. She
repeated this presentation later in the month for the New England
Chapter of the American College & Research Libraries group, and again
for the Boston Women's Information Networking group.
- Eric Celeste gave a presentation about DSpace to an MIT Industrial
Liaison Program group in India this January. He repeated the presentation
for MIT staff later in the month. The Fall/Winter edition of "MIT
Libraries News" featured an article entitled "DSpace: Sharing MIT's
Intellectual Output".
- DSpace will be on the program at the following conferences this
Spring and Summer:
- Coalition for Networked Information Meeting
- American Society for Engineering Education Annual Meeting
- Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (ACM &
IEEE)
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