<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2722" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY> <DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#ff0000><SPAN class=417542215-03102005><STRONG>Please do not forward this note outside the Computer History Museum and its volunteer set.</STRONG></SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>    =============================</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>Early this year, I was puzzled by brief SCC discussions of the MIT/HP DSpace open source institutional repository software offering.  That puzzlement intensified two months ago when I reviewed a Digital Curation Center (Univ. of Glasgow) chapter for the online digital curation "best practices" manual it is building/sponsoring with U.K. governmental funding.</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>The author of that chapter is recommending two packages, DSpace and Fedora (from Cornell Univ.), as I recall, without even mentioning the roughly 100 existing competitive packages.  When I asked his reason for the seeming favoratism, he indicated that these packages were the only ones that had support for digital preservation.</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>So I looked into DSpace in some detail, including sitting in on an RLG-sponsored colloquium held in the Spring at Stanford Univ.--a colloquium at which two papers were about D  Gross findings:</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>    (1) It is surprisingly difficult to determine from Web accessible publications what DSpace actually provides, and what is vaporware.  I therefore followed up with some e-mail correspondence with its principals: Mackenzie Smith (MIT) and Robert Tansley (HP Labs).</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>    (2) Among institutional repository projects at universities, DSpace is the leader in uptake.  However, whether this is because of the SW quality, or because the DSpace team is by far the most effective at promoting its work, is unclear to me.</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>    (3) Notwithstanding the DSpace team's emphasis on digital preservation in its promotional descriptions, DSpace does not seem to have so far implemented much more support for long-term preservation than other institutional repository projects.</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>    (4) A bridge for exporting/importing collections from/to Greenstone to/from DSpace is described in the latest D-Lib Magazine issue.  See <FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><FONT face=Arial size=2> Witten, Ian H. David Bainbridge, Chi-Yu Huang and Katherine J. Don, and Robert Tansley, <I><A href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/witten/09witten.html"><U>StoneD: A Bridge between Greenstone and DSpace</U></A></I><B>, </B>D-Lib Magazine 11(9), September 2005.</FONT>  </FONT></SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>    (4) The latest number of my Digital Document Newsletter (DDQ 4(3)) discusses these topics with reference to DSpace.  See <A href="http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/ddq_4_3.htm">http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/ddq_4_3.htm</A>.</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>Attached,here, FYI, is an excerpt from the most recent e-mail I have from Robert Tansley:</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN class=417542215-03102005></SPAN></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT><SPAN class=417542215-03102005> <DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial><FONT color=#0000ff><FONT size=2><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>"</SPAN>Most of our end users don't even know what provenance is.  In combination with the fact our limited resources face an enormous number of other technical and non-technical issues, </SPAN></SPAN></SPAN><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><SPAN class=653083821-29092005>we've had to limit our ourselves to </SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></FONT></FONT></FONT><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN class=653083821-29092005>laying the groundwork which will enable future custodians to provide provenance services in much the same way archivists do today (curators not having had the luxury of being able to cryptographically sign physical artefacts.)</SPAN></FONT></SPAN></DIV> <DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN class=653083821-29092005></SPAN></FONT></SPAN> </DIV> <DIV dir=ltr align=left></SPAN><FONT face=Arial><FONT color=#0000ff><FONT size=2><SPAN class=653083821-29092005><SPAN class=417542215-03102005>"</SPAN>However, DSpace is an open source project.  If you feel DSpace needs work in this area, please feel free to join our community, and contribute to address the issue you describe.  T</SPAN><SPAN class=653083821-29092005>his will benefit the huge number of users of the "most widely used package among respondents to the Lynch/Lippincott survey of U.S. institutional repositories".<SPAN class=417542215-03102005>"</SPAN></SPAN></FONT></FONT></FONT></DIV></SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>Best wishes, Henry</FONT></DIV> <DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.     </FONT><A href="http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/"><FONT face=Arial size=2>http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/</FONT></A><FONT face=Arial><FONT size=2> <SPAN class=417542215-03102005>    </SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>HMG Consulting</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>