Faculty Profile: Dr. Ceasar L. McDowell

The Project: MIT’s Center for Reflective Community Practice
The Challenge: Generate and share knowledge openly among community and university groups
The Solution: DSpace at MIT

At the Center for Reflective Community Practice, Dr. Ceasar McDowell and his colleagues bring together community leaders and academics to generate and share knowledge.

Before he learned about DSpace the prospect of building a custom system to share knowledge across communities was “pretty frightening.” So when he heard that the MIT Libraries had already cracked this code, he knew he could use DSpace as a backbone of his work.

DSpace and the Center for Reflective Community Practice share common goals:

• Open, direct access to information
• Worldwide exposure
• Immediate distribution
• Sharing knowledge within and across communities

McDowell’s community development work centers on generating, sharing, and distributing knowledge. He sees DSpace as a centerpiece of this work:

"DSpace is a rich part of the knowledge process. ... This is the future of where we're heading in research."

For example, one of the center’s research projects will use DSpace as a way to share, organize, and distribute data. Storing its early data in DSpace will enable participants to analyze the research and later add their results to the initial research data.

DSpace also serves as an effective marketing tool to advertise the center’s work – within MIT, in the communities it serves, to funders, and around the world.

To faculty who have yet to explore and adopt DSpace to house their research, McDowell says: “You are missing a big opportunity. This is the future of where we’re heading in research.”

To find out more about the Center for Reflective Community Practice, visit the center's Web site and also see their DSpace service.

Dr. Ceasar McDowell is Professor of the Practice of Community Development, in the Center for Reflective Community Practice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.