NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
January 28, 2003

                         DSpace Federation Announced
               Next Step for the MIT-Based Open-Source Repository
                         for Digital Scholarly Production
                              http://www.dspace.org/

     *** Mellon Grant Facilitates Building Initial Federation With Columbia,
    Cornell, Ohio State, Rochester, Toronto, and Washington Universities ***

MIT Libraries
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:  MacKenzie Smith, kenzie@mit.edu

MIT and Six Major Research Universities Announce
DSpace Federation Collaboration
January 28, 2003, Cambridge, MA

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries have announced initial development of the DSpace Federation with six major research universities: Columbia University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, and the Universities of Rochester, Toronto, and Washington. DSpace, a digital repository for intellectual output, was launched worldwide November 4, 2002 as an open source system, the result of a two-year collaboration between the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, HP's strategic research facility. The system is now in full production at MIT, and holds approximately one thousand items from five early-adopter communities.

"The DSpace repository is initially addressing a growing institutional need: how to collect, preserve, index and distribute the intellectual output of an organization that originates in complex digital formats, said Ann Wolpert, Director of the MIT Libraries. "This is a time-consuming task for individual faculty and their departments, labs, and centers to manage, and something that the DSpace system will make easier and more affordable."

MIT is now seeking to extend the scope of DSpace by offering it to other research-intensive institutions as an open-source system, and to build a Federation among these institutions. By making the system freely available as open-source software, DSpace will enable even small colleges to run repositories with existing resources. This project will explore the adaptability of DSpace to institutions beyond MIT, develop documentation for future Federators, and investigate new types of services that can be built on federated collections held in DSpace repositories at different institutions. MIT believes that by developing a Federation of institutions that employ the same software and protocols, the sustainability and potential for continued development of the system are enhanced.
The one-year project is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has awarded a $300,000 grant to MIT to work with the six institutions on the further development of the DSpace Federation.  "The goals of the DSpace Federation include developing a critical corpus of content that represents the intellectual output of the world's leading research universities, promoting the continued development of the DSpace service through the open-source community, and promoting interoperability of archival repositories and long-term preservation of scholarly work by complying with published standards and supporting national and international initiatives to develop standards in this domain," said MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology in the MIT Libraries.

Eugenie Prime, Director of HP's Corporate Research Libraries, said "Establishing the DSpace Federation is an important step for MIT and their partner institutions.  It marks a transition in the way that academic institutions and other enterprises provide stewardship for the digital information that they produce.  HP Labs is proud to be deeply involved in this transition."

Institutions participating in the DSpace Federation project represent a range of organization types with varied motivations for investigating this technology. Susan Gibbons, Director, Digital Library Initiatives, University of Rochester, said "DSpace enhances learning by sharing information as it develops and is exchanged through informal communication by the academic community.  Perhaps most exciting is DSpace's potential to create and enhance partnerships between libraries and those who generate new knowledge on a university or college campus."

"Over a year ago Ohio State University began a project called the 'Knowledge Bank' to better organize the burgeoning amount of academic digital assets being created by its faculty and students," said Joe Branin, Director of the Ohio State University Libraries. "We quickly realized that DSpace at MIT was an initiative and approach we needed to watch carefully. Now, we are pleased to be one of the early partners to implement and evaluate DSpace outside of MIT. We are, of course, interested in the technical side of DSpace, but what impresses us most is the openness that has characterized the whole DSpace development program at MIT, from their open source system approach to their sharing on the Web all their planning and policy documentation."


About DSpace
DSpace, a groundbreaking digital library system to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output of a university's research faculty in digital formats.

It is designed with a flexible storage and retrieval architecture adaptable to a multitude of data formats and distinct research disciplines. Different communities of an institution can adapt and customize the DSpace system to meet their individual needs and manage the data submission process themselves. Furthermore, a customized user portal can be created for each community, promoting a user environment closely matching a community's own terminology and culture. For more information on DSpace see http://www.dspace.org/

Page last updated 04/30/03
Created and maintained by J. Douglass Klein, Associate Dean for Information Technology, Union College