And the prize goes to... DSpace!

At long last, I have settled on developing DSpace for La Salle. Everytime that I talk repositories to faculty, they want to start throwing teaching materials into it. I found an interesting paper that talks about the possible integrations of DSpace with Sakai, an alternative to Blackboard which I was asked to find out how my systems may integrate with. Also, I saw a posting yesterday that Fedora and DSpace have recently decided to try to identify some areas to work together. We still don't feel confident that we could develop Fedora here without a programmer, but we feel good about DSpace being within our skillsets. I still have a crush on Fedora, and would welcome the intersection of the two systems to allow me more opportunity to play with that system as well.

I had originally not considered DSpace, as I always thought that it was just for ETDs. People are using it differently than that, and as I started demoing CONTENTdm and asking users about their experiences, I started getting pointed to DSpace more and more, given our desire to manage diverse scholarly materials and didactic resources. The dealsealer was seeing how Australian National University migrated from CONTENTdm into DSpace and came up with something what I would be looking to create for our Special Collections: http://anulib.anu.edu.au/subjects/ap/digilib/.

We're still early enough in our digitization game here that I don't want to end up locking us into a proprietary database without getting a greater sense of the digital directions of the campus. The openness of the code and flexibility of metadata input/output will set us up for optimum interoperability with future systems. Also, DSpace runs on Dublin Core, which is far from intimidating, but also allows input of METS, which I think should allow for a fun challenge.

Now the preservation question... OCLC's digital archive service is still looking pretty good, as they are reasonably priced compared to other services. I also may be looking at using the money that I save on software acquisition to mount an argument for Sun Microsystems' Honeycomb or something along those lines. It is too onorous to throw manual digital preservation administration and data backup on top of a librarian's other duties -- Therefore, all redundancies and reporting will be automated and/or outsourced so that it is done efficiently and effectively.