The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Open Source: Shared Intelligence Online for Researchers
It’s been five years since MIT Libraries and HP joined forces to create a non-profit online community and data repository for scholars called DSpace. DSpace was set up to access, manage and preserve scholarly works online. Over the last five years there has been significant growth and actiity in the DSpace community. Last week it was announced that a more formal framework was to be established around the community called the DSpace Foundation.
Michelle Kimpton, a former official of the Internet Archive, has been named executive director of the new foundation. Over 200 universities, museums, research institutes, and companies belong to the community. DSpace members are spread over the world and represent every continent except Antarctica. The number of members from within the US are far outnumbered by those from outside. The members include Boston University, the Smithsonian Institute, Nagasaki University, Göteborg University, and Zhejiang Univeristy.
DSpace is a huge electronic repository of intellectual property created by research institutions and it is powered by an Open Source data storage and retrieval system. DSpace content is not limited to just scholarly papers. It includes books, video, film, photographs, and 3-dimensional scanned data. The DSpace community itself is driving research in the area of data storage and retrieval, building a solution founded in Open Source. The large data sets, the diverse set of data formats, and issues surrounding finding efficient techniques for searching and managing metadata are all issues that are actively being pursued by the DSpace community.
An example of an application built within DSpace is the China Digital Museum project that brings together artifacts from 18 campus museums, each with 20,000 – 50,000 objects from various branches of science and technology.
Open Source projects like DSpace are interesting because of their use of Open Source, sophisticated technology, and global reach of their community.
