Managing Persistent Content: the DSpace Project

DSpace - a research collaboration between MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories - is an open source platform for the collection, preservation,
discovery and distribution of digital assets. It utilizes Dublin Core metadata
to describe the assets, and integrates numerous open source components for
search (Lucene), metadata storage (PostgreSQL), and Web user interface
(Apache/Tomcat).

DSpace is designed to hold the entire spectrum of a research institution's
intellectual property -- from documents to data sets to video. It is intended
to
serve as a permanent repository and also enable the distribution of these
assets
to a larger community.  This broad mission raises a number of issues, including
DRM, access control, content preservation across format change, etc.

The presentation will consist of an architectural tour of the DSpace system,
with special emphasis on the challenges of providing a permanent repository for
content, a requirement not typically made of a CMS.


Richard Rodgers
DSpace Federation Systems Manager
rrodgers@mit.edu