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From The Libraries
[DSpace Faculty Liaison Margret Branschofsky and MIT Libraries Communication Coordinator Ruth K. Seidman discuss online posting and retrieval of documents.]
Over the spring and summer of 2002, DSpace, the digital repository of MIT research developed by the MIT Libraries in collaboration with the Hewlett-Packard Company (MIT Faculty Newsletter, April/May 2000, p. 18), underwent a testing period to gain an understanding of how contributors use the system and what features they find most useful. The system is scheduled to go live early in the fall.
Content for DSpace is provided through MIT units such as academic departments or laboratories that form DSpace Communities. The Early Adopters, the four participating Communities in the test phase, 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 submitted digital items to collections within their own "Communities" and provided feedback to the DSpace team. In addition, DSpace has loaded a collection of out-of-print books provided by the MIT Press.
Members of the faculty serve on the DSpace Advisory Board, providing guidance from the perspective of MIT users of DSpace, both as contributors of content and as end-users of the system. Several of the design elements in the system came directly from advice provided by this group. MIT Libraries are also administering a survey of MIT faculty in order to learn about their perceptions and anticipated use of DSpace. The survey results will further contribute to DSpace design plans.
Benefits of Participation
DSpace provides long-term physical storage and management of digital items in a secure, professionally managed repository including standard operating procedures such as backup, mirroring, refreshing media, and disaster recovery. It has long been the role of academic libraries to preserve the print record of scholarly work. With DSpace, MIT Libraries is making a commitment to preserve the digital record of scholarly work over a long period of time. Techniques for assuring long-term preservation of digital files are still in a stage of experimentation and discovery, but MIT Libraries will be monitoring developments in this field and will take appropriate actions to ensure the safety of the collections in DSpace.
Visibility for research results is another benefit of DSpace. Because ultimately this will be a repository containing content from all of MIT, it will have more visibility than individual Websites. Users will consider it an online place to find MIT research information. The Digital Library of MIT Theses is already receiving significant amounts of access from users worldwide. In future releases end users will be able to establish subscriptions that will result in e-mail notification when items fitting their interest profiles are added to DSpace. Communities will also be able to target discussion lists and news groups in their field to receive e-mail notification of new items.
Searching capabilities for DSpace provide targeted retrieval. DSpace has powerful search capabilities that allow users to retrieve deposited material in a variety of ways, making it easier to find the information being sought.
Participation relieves labs and centers of the time-consuming work associated with making material available on the Web as well as in print. The system, while professionally managed and staffed, allows some customization of look and feel for communities and collections. It also provides flexible submission processes that can be adapted to workflows in a particular community.
Finally, DSpace allows distribution of formats such as data sets, images, and audio and video files, not easily handled through traditional publications. In the case of images, many journals require a higher page charge for pages containing images. As a consequence authors tend to limit the number of images they submit for publication. But when an author stores an image in DSpace, a persistent URL is assigned to that file; the author can then use that URL as a citation in his or her published works, referring people to the images on DSpace.
Seeking Solutions to Scholarly Communications Issues
The scholarly community is watching with interest DSpace and other efforts to create digital collections capturing the intellectual output of universities. A newly issued report from The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), "The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper" (available at http://www.arl.org/sparc) looks at these repositories from two perspectives. First, they are seen as an extension of academic institutions' responsibility as generators of primary research seeking to preserve and leverage their constituents' intellectual assets. Second, such efforts are considered as an important component in the evolving structure of scholarly communication.
The Executive Summary states: "Institutional repositories can provide an immediate and valuable complement to the existing scholarly publishing model, while stimulating innovation in a new disaggregated publishing structure that will evolve and improve over time." Such repositories provide a critical component in reforming today's system of scholarly communication by expanding access to research and reasserting the academy's control over scholarship.
Next Steps and Future Directions
Now that the testing phase has been completed, additional MIT communities are joining DSpace as content providers. Faculty members are encouraged to contact dspace-info@mit.edu to learn more about participation. Beyond the Institute, in response to considerable interest from peer institutions, the MIT Libraries are exploring the best ways to make DSpace available to other universities on a federated model and also to make the system widely available for other institutions to use under an Open Source license.
MacKenzie Smith, DSpace project director and MIT Libraries associate director for technology, has commented: "The DSpace system, both in what it's trying to accomplish and in how it's being deployed at MIT, is a truly groundbreaking effort that has the potential to influence scholarly communication in ways that we can hardly imagine right now. Having a platform like this will allow so much to happen: new and innovative research in federating distributed repositories and digital preservation, new models for scholarly communication, and new ways to support educational technology initiatives, to name just a few. And most importantly, DSpace will allow libraries to continue to fulfill their mission to capture, manage, preserve, and make available the output of scholarship in the digital era."
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