The DSpace.org Project

What is DSpace?

Developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard, DSpace is an innovational open source library system for digitally capturing and storing the intellectual research of a university's faculty within a metadata framework. It facilitates the preservation and distribution of of various technical journals, conference papers, research images, and other research documents in digital formats. Since its initial release in November 2002, more than 400 institutions have installed DSpace and sourceforge.net has recorded over 4000 downloads.

The DSpace.org website arises out of a need to provide both a channel of communication and a means of collaboration among members of institutions running DSpace. It aims to provide an online community whereby users can share a common purpose in the planning, usage, development, and administration of DSpace.

A Day In the Life of DSpace.org

Abel Kotrba, a member of Cornell's technical DSpace staff, reads a forum posting by Santos Riston asking how to extend the DSpace batch importer with extra metadata and posts a reply regarding Cornell Libraries' solution.
	Toby McColgan, a member of the DSpace Federation at Cambridge University, reads Abel's reply and checks his profile page to verify his credibility.
Courtney Grefe, a writer for the MIT DSpace staff, finishes writing a new informational page entitled "Marketing Approaches and Ideas".
	Julie Harford, a DSpace administrator, reviews Courtney's submitted informational page and approves the page for staging.
Julie makes the new page on marketing live through the administrator's interface.
	Boyd Chern, a DSpace policy planner for the University of Washington, browses the information pages and reads the new page about marketing policies.

Written by Jason Goggin, Eddie Kay, and Edmond Lau

dspace-devel@mit.edu