lib-ir: Fwd: [Dspace-general] Summary of March 2004 DSpace user group outcomes

[Carol Hixson <chixson@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

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Carol

>Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 17:49:37 -0500
>To: dspace-general@MIT.EDU
>From: MacKenzie Smith <kenzie@MIT.EDU>
>Subject: [Dspace-general] Summary of March 2004 DSpace user group outcomes
>
>
>Greetings all,
>
>At the close of the very successful first meeting of the DSpace user 
>community last week, I promised to send out a summary of the major 
>outcomes. A more thorough summary of the meeting will follow, and we are 
>hard at work to get all the presentations and other material up on the 
>DSpace Federation website just as quickly as we can.  Thanks again to 
>everyone who presented at the meeting and provided us with such 
>interesting topics for discussion.
>
>Summary:
>
>-- The DSpace platform is being put to a variety of uses, primarily to 
>create institutional repositories of research publications and other 
>material, but also for other applications (e-thesis repositories, learning 
>object repositories, e-journal publishing, cultural material collections, 
>electronic records management, and so on). Its utility lies in its focus 
>on making content accessible (findable, retrievable) and preserving it 
>over time, and those two things should remain its primary focus going 
>forward, along with developing and perpetuating standards for information 
>and digital object models. There was general validation of a proposed new 
>2.0 architecture which is more modular and has a more formal API structure 
>that allows other, more context-specific applications to be built on top 
>of DSpace.
>
>-- The DSpace Federation is now open to all. Anyone can join, everyone can 
>contribute. There are many ways to contribute:
>         -- become part of the DSpace developer community. We will soon be 
> establishing a group of system architects and developers to share ongoing 
> responsibility for designing, maintaining, and enhancing the DSpace 
> system -- participation is welcome from any institution, and the exact 
> criteria and process for joining the group will be established shortly by 
> a seed group of 5-6 developers from different organizations using DSpace 
> now. More on this soon.
>         -- if you can't contribute programming, there's still lots to do, 
> including: testing and debugging the system (including supplying 
> patches), writing and reviewing documentation, and providing domain 
> expertise to inform functionality that the system should implement (for 
> example, by participating in one of the new SIGs described below). We'll 
> work with the community to establish channels for all these activities 
> within the DSpace Federation framework.
>
>-- It's time to start thinking about the long-term governance of DSpace 
>outside of MIT or HP (e.g. the social, legal, political, economic, policy, 
>and organizational aspects). We should look at other open source software 
>governance models (e.g. Apache Foundation, Global Grid Forum, W3C, etc.) 
>and develop a plan either to create a new non-profit organization for this 
>purpose, or join an existing one. We should explore various models and 
>policies for transfer of intellectual property - for example, copyright 
>and licensing of code, and the DSpace trademark - to this organization, so 
>that it can be established in such a way that an initial contribution of 
>DSpace IP from MIT and HP is tenable, and so that academic and commercial 
>institutions will be willing to contribute additional IP in the future. As 
>a first step towards this, the current mailing lists and other DSpace 
>Federation services will migrate over to the dspace.org domain from its 
>current home in the mit.edu domain. Work on the DSpace platform and 
>related efforts will continue unabated while this entity is being 
>established under the current, informal governance model.
>
>-- Institutional Repositories are a high-value, long-term vision, but are 
>still very much works in progress. We need to continue to collaborate on 
>how best to build them, by sharing information about advocacy, marketing, 
>assessment, policies, business plans, and a myriad of other issues that 
>help us understand how institutional repositories will work to best 
>advantage. Since these issues go beyond the DSpace platform to include 
>other organizations, platforms, and views on access and preservation, we 
>need to establish another, more inclusive community with which to 
>collaborate. This community would include DSpace users but not 
>exclusively. SPARC (and possibly other organizations) will be approached 
>to help create this forum, and the DSpace-based institutional repository 
>implementors will help in whatever way we can.
>
>-- The DSpace Federation will continue to foster new and innnovative uses 
>of the DSpace platform by creating a set of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) 
>who can discuss the necessary features and functions of particular 
>applications of the platform. A preliminary list of these might include: 
>institutional repositories, e-thesis repositories, learning object 
>repositories, records managements systems, and publishing systems (open 
>access or other). These will be hosted on the dspace.org website and will 
>be open to all. Institutions using DSpace will ensure that they have 
>cross-representation on these groups and the developers groups so that 
>useful features and functions specified by SIGs are successfully implemented.
>
>The feedback we've gotten about the value of the meeting to the DSpace 
>community was clear: it was very useful!  We at MIT certainly found it so, 
>and hope to keep working with you for a long time to come. Thanks again to 
>everyone who attended the meeting and made it so productive and lively. We 
>hope we'll get an opportunity to do it again!
>
>
>
>MacKenzie Smith
>Associate Director for Technology
>MIT Libraries
>Building 14S-308
>77 Massachusetts Avenue
>Cambridge, MA  02139
>(617)253-8184
>kenzie@mit.edu
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