Last week, I told you about how the Vatican picked Hewlett-Packard (HP) in its efforts to improve online access to the Apostolic Library. HP scored another big win this week with the announcement of its collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (Check "HP, Vatican to develop new 'Holy See Plus Plus' programming language" for the Vatican-HP story.)
Sally Atwood tells us the story.
Every year MIT researchers create at least 10,000 papers, data files, images, collections of field notes, and audio and video clips.
Until recently there has been no overall plan to archive or preserve such work for posterity. But true to its problem-solving nature, MIT has come up with a solution. In September the Institute launched DSpace, a Web-based institutional repository where faculty and researchers can save their intellectual output and share it with their colleagues around the world and for centuries to come. The result of a two-year collaboration of the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard, DSpace is built on open-source software and is available to anyone free of charge. But it’s even more important to note that many believe this groundbreaking effort will fundamentally change the way scholars disseminate their research findings.
The alliance between HP and the MIT became a 5-year, $25 million project. As mentioned earlier, HP will use open-source software, like the Jakarta Lucene search engine, or Dublin Core, an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards.
Before going further, please remember that this story was featured in Technology Review, published by the MIT, and that it will appear on December 13, 2002 in MIT News.
Having a digital superarchive makes MIT’s intellectual output available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, but the greatest value of DSpace may be in revolutionizing the way research is communicated and disseminated.
Once DSpace is up and running, it will serve as a portal not only to MIT research, but also to research at partnering institutions. To test this possibility, MIT has entered into a federation with five other research institutions -- Columbia University, Ohio State University, and the universities of Washington, Toronto, and Rochester -- which will become the early adopters from outside the Institute. More than 30 other institutions have lined up to install DSpace on their campuses once the system proves itself.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, ta-da-da-da...
For Robert Cooke, Cornell University’s dean of the faculty, MIT’s attention to the needs of its faculty, the open architecture of DSpace, the federation design, and its decentralized nature comprise "a genius stroke." DSpace, he says, is "destined to fundamentally reshape and enhance the way research universities and their faculties function."
If you want to read more technical details about this project than PR material, please visit the DSpace website.
Source: Sally Atwood, MIT Technology Review, November 8, 2002
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