Principal Investigator Keith Glavash
Co-investigators Jerome Friedman , John Lienhard , Harold Abelson , Ceasar McDowell , Jerome Saltzer , Bruce Tidor
Project Website http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/
As a joint project of MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, DSpace provides stable long-term storage needed to house the approximately 10,000 articles produced annually by MIT faculty, researchers, centers and labs.
DSpace is a long-term, searchable digital archive. It creates unchanging URLs for stored materials and automatically backs up one institution's archives to another's. Today, DSpace is being used by 79 institutions, with more on the way. But as my little story about Kohnfelder's thesis demonstrates, archiving data is only half the problem. In order to be useful, archives must also enable researchers to find what they are looking for. Sending e-mail to the author worked for me, but it's not a good solution for the masses.
Long-term funding is another problem that DSpace needs to solve. Today, development on the DSpace system is funded by short-term grants. That's great for doing research, but it's not a good model for a facility that's destined to be the long-term memory of the Institute's research output.
(1) Submitter uses a Web-based interface to deposit files. DSpace handles any format from simple text documents to datasets and digital video.(2) Data files are organized together into related sets. "Metadata," technical information about the data, is kept to support preservation.(3) An item is an "archival atom" consisting of grouped, related content and metadata, which is indexed for browsing and searching.(4) Items are organized into "communities" corresponding to parts of the organization such as departments, labs, and schools.(5) DSpace's modular architecture allows for expansion across disciplinary as well as institutional boundaries.(6) In functional preservation, files are kept accessible as technology formats, media, and paradigms evolve over time.(7) The end-user interface supports searching and browsing the archives. Items can be opened in either a Web browser or a suitable application program.
DSpace continues to grow the base of users using the system. Significant initiatives such as plans by the UK Research Councils to mandate that all funded research outputs are posted online in open access repositories. This would serve as a significant boost to Dspace usage.