Meeting Brings DSpace Users from Around the World to MIT

Contact: Heather Denny
MIT Libraries Communications Coordinator
hdenny @mit.edu
617-253-5686, (F) 617-253-8894

April 7, 2004

"If you build it, they will come." Build a groundbreaking digital institutional repository that allows for the capture, storage, indexing, preservation , and redistribution of intellectual output in digital formats and scholars will submit their work. That's the idea behind DSpace, and that's what brought research institutions, libraries, and cultural heritage institutions from around the world to MIT for the inaugural Users Group Meeting in early March.

The open source software system, launched just over a year ago by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard was made freely available to research institutions worldwide. Since then, DSpace has been downloaded over 8,000 times, adopted for use by more than 100 organizations and recognized by IEEE Spectrum as a technological "Holy Grail" or, "a long-standing quest that could fundamentally change something about our lives."

"While there's no question that institutional repositories are of high value, they are still very much works in progress," said MIT Libraries Associate Director for Technology, MacKenzie Smith. Smith, who is on the DSpace Steering Committee and helped organize the event, recognized the need for a forum for early adopters to share their experiences, ideas, and concerns about DSpace. The meeting also was an opportunity to see how others were using the software and identify areas where collaboration would be beneficial. Presentations on current and future work being done with the DSpace platform revealed that in addition to being used for institutional repositories, DSpace is being put to a variety of other uses, including e-journal publishing, cultural material collection, and electronic records management.

DSpace creators see these innovative uses of the platform leading to even more enhancements in the system. As a result of the meeting, the DSpace Federation - originally a community of early DSpace adopters - will now be open to all institutions, so that system architects and developers can share in the design, maintenance and enhancement of the system. The DSpace Federation also plans to look at other opportunities for collaboration on issues such as long-term governance, advocacy, marketing, and assessment. More information on the DSpace Federation can be found at www.dspace.org.

By fostering new and innovative uses of the DSpace platform, MIT Libraries will continue to develop improvements to the system that will benefit the MIT community. DSpace at MIT has been growing steadily since November of 2002. With the recent addition of the Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE) collection, the repository now holds 3565 items within its 31 collections, representing over 2500 MIT authors.

Faculty, Departments, Labs and Centers are encouraged to become a part of DSpace by contributing their digital collections to the repository. To learn more about how DSpace can manage and preserve your work, contact DSpace User Support Manager, Margret Branschofsky, at margretb@mit.edu or 3-1293. For more information on DSpace at MIT visit http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/.