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.

Non-use of ContentDM and other sites

One software that we are looking at is ContentDM, which is a great software for accessioning and displaying digital assets. It is clear, easy to use, and can pretty much work right out of the box. I have yet to come across any librarian who really dislikes the software. The one comment that I have heard, however, is that no one really uses the site. So why go through the effort of digitization if no one is really using the software? Digitization is anything but cheap -- Between licenses and staff, a digitization project can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Cornell, too, published a report evaluating the non-use of D-Space at their university. The whole report can be found at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html. Part of the reason for non-use is that each discipline already has mechanisms for publication of materials in place and that their DSpace is additional, operating outside the sphere of traditional avenues.

Librarians are dreaming up these wonderful digital repositories, and companies are creating awesome software packages to host them, but is it all just Library Science laboratory work? How can digital initiatives be made more relevant and integrative into the academic sphere? Blackboard and other class content management and presentation software systems are thriving, because students and faculty have to go to them for class materials. It almost makes sense to grow a repository as attached to Blackboard, as people are already there.

I see now why ArtStor has taken off so well in the academic art realm -- Faculty can direct their students to the repository, add to the population of the image collection, sort and create their presentations and pretty much base classes out of there. I don't know if ContentDM can offer similar flexibility, or if the collections that we are speaking of digitizing have as much relevance to the coursework as would images of art for art history classes.

But it could.

And with careful planning, maybe it will?

A Decision, I believe...

So Fedora may have gotten the best of me. I don't think that I want to pursue an open source solution me, by my lonesome, as my one mind blowing project. I really wanted to, in a way, to make myself feel smart -- Now I'm feeling like it would be an overwhelming decision. So... We may go with ContentDM for images.

My hesitations with ContentDM or any proprietary software:

1) Lack of ability to customize and to integrate into the library's website
2) Cost of updates / Inability to stay up with updates, if cost prohibitive
3) Creating a "cookie cutter" respository

I will be learning more about ContentDM next month at Palinet. My hypothesis is:
ContentDM will prove to be much more intuitive and easier to work with out of the box than an open source system. ContentDM will be less customizable and harder to integrate into the library's website, but may be worth the sacrifice, due to the lack of labor that the program will require to set up. ContentDM is making strides in abililty to handle text-based assets, but will continue to be outshined by DSpace or other institutional academic respositories.

I want to keep my hand in open source work to some degree so maybe we will look at implementing DSpace or EPrints for an academic respository of research and writing. The open source community is hard at work deploying cutting edge technologies and programming to make collections more accessible - I think it would be a good experience to have to do some of the original programming myself, and not rely completely on tech support and help lines to get things done...