Potential Collaborators

The Dienst protocol provides an interesting baseline for functionality. We have experience with Dienst ourselves from our work with the CSTR Project, and with the Ethesis Desktop Delivery project.

In the Dienst Protocol, certain functions are amalgamated that we will need to separate out. Straightforward enhancements to the protocol won't quite work. The NCSTRL Dienst implementation is not directly usable. Too much is hard-coded perl. But the principals of NCSTRL, Carl Lagoze for example, would be excellent collaborators.

JSTOR is an excellent example of a large-scale widely accessible collection with an excellent user interface. Initial contacts with the JSTOR folks should be pursued. It is possible that there are opportunities to work together on modules common to both our system and the next version of JSTOR.

Flexible and Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (FEDORA) is another project at the Cornell Digital Library Research Group (home of Dienst). It includes a thoroughly-documented architecture and reference implementation which may be downloaded, but there does not seem to be a publically-available prototype of any scale. They have done valuable work on a distributed repository platform with support for exensible digital formats which is worth a close look, and probably at least some attempt at collaboration.

The Making of America II project is an archival repository similar to Dspace, although oriented toward retrospectively digitized collections and lacking rights management. Their approach to metadata is worth a close examination; see both the white papers and demonstration site.

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