lib-ir: dspace notes

["JQ Johnson" <jqj@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

Our dspace implementation is now pretty stable.  I think we're almost
ready to start accepting submissions -- definitely by next week.  There are
a couple of key issues to address first, though.

One issue is setup of communities.  Single community?  Or a policy on
what types of UO organization get their own community?

Another issue is creation of collections.  Looks like we have to do that
centrally.  Can be me for now, but will eventually have to be a
designated dspace admin.  For now, I recommend that default be public
read, and that we not set up private collections until we have a very
clear understanding of the implications.  The big time sink will be
adding individuals to the collection-specific groups of who is allowed
to submit new items to the collection.

A third issue is creation of users.  We can allow users to create their own
accounts, and probably can modify the code to do minimal pre-authorization.
With some development effort we could require radius IDs (user@darkwing or
user@gladstone).  In addition to authorization for users we need to grant
appropriate users the right to add items to individual collections.  That
could potentially be quite a bit of work.  I don't see how to decentralize
this to community managers.

By the way, there doesn't seem to be any way to do any authority control,
and there won't be quite a while.

Still a few misc issues that must be fixed:
 1/ default license is wrong.
 2/ we need instructions for submitting compound documents, notably HTML
files with support files.  Current setup is very awkward since relative
links don't work.  This is not an issue for PDF.
 3/ we need to decide how much local help to provide.
 4/ we need to register our repository with OAI.
 5/ we probably need to by a server certificate (about $100/year) for
security.

I'm working with Systems to develop an upgrade path for after the pilot
project.

Overall, the DSpace code is quite buggy.  I think it will eventually
stabilize, but we should expect rough edges.

JQ Johnson                    	Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator	e-mail: jqj@darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon     	1-541-346-1746 (v); -3485 (fax)
Eugene, OR  97403-1299        	http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj