I hate the term. But the very fact that there is a debate around the issue means that that debate should be vocalized. The article should spell out completely the criticisms of the term and let the reader decide.

(Via Michael, Michael and Steven)

It is not good to talk about Zen because Zen is nothingness … If you talk about it you are always lying, and if you don’t talk about it no one knows it is there.

-Robert Pirsig, his “final interview,” in the Observer.

Today I was walking to school and was thinking about what has been the unifying thing in all the various things I have been interested in. And how did I end up in libraries and studying “information”, a place I never really planned to be, and I didn’t know it was my place until I was already here.

I realized that the thing I enjoy about the library is that it exists as a cultural memory. And while that is a grand thing in and of itself, it is much more interesting if we look at it at a slightly deeper level. We can push the metaphor a little bit more, get some more out of it . If the library is a memory, it functions like memory in its faults and in its benefits. It distorts, chooses to forget, blocks out, makes biased decisions. Things are shelved and often used, things are shelved and not found. And all these forgetting and blockages are powered by the history of the culture itself, its wars and its ideas, which leave its mark on memory.

Then I continued walking and I realized that, actually, culture in many ways doesn’t need the library; in others it does. The culture’s memory is being written quite fine without formal channels. The light polls and telephone posts are covered with advertisements, art, religion, personal politics and public opinion.

Of course, some of those things won’t survive. And the argument is that the library (the Archive in general) should step in to help. And this is how the memory faults, because nothing is saved perfectly. It is cleaned up, selected, categorized and in that distorted because things are in reality very messy.

More to come.

But, at least while alive, at any one time someone’s thoughts are never static. Particularly when engaged in a major ongoing investigation and inner debate, we often believe one side of an issue over another. Not just in one’s lifetime, but while walking down the street. In debating with others we are won over to their side in one debate, and maybe at a further time we keep our convictions.

We have this almost religious belief, however, that one’s books are one’s final thoughts on a subject. Who’s to assume that someone hadn’t changed their minds after their last book, died with a death bed conversion. Should we not say “Augustine’s thoughts” but only “Augustine’s writings”? And what about the possibilities of deception, irony or even self-deception, fighting a position we don’t want ourselves to believe. Do I even know my position in a self-conscious fashion?

Elaine Peterson has written a very interesting article looking at some of the philosophical contingencies of user tagging of folksonomy, something which I think is very necessary and I was happy to see.

In her introduction she makes the important point that, regardless of what one’s metaphysical or ontological beliefs are, for classification purposes, Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction must apply. A book cannot be both A and not-A if we considering its classification. She rightly notes: “It is irrelevant that digital items can reside in more than one place, since one is talking about a classification scheme, not about the items themselves.”

However, I disagree with her second introductory point, that the cataloguer, like the librarian, should be neutral and follow the intent of the author. It is questionable, in the first place, whether we can even access the intent of the author (see Foucault, Barthes, Derrida). Nevertheless, as cataloguers and librarians our charge is not the book, but the user, and we should look at things from their perspective. Our “neutrality” does not come from following the author–creation mythologies are not in science, they are in religion; Hannibal Lecter’s guide to kidneys and fava beans is not under culinary arts, but deviant psychology. Thus Peterson’s assertion: “the goal is to recognize the author’s intent over others’ interpretation,” is flawed. There is a social aspect to classification: no matter how much the author wishes or believes, a fictional account cannot be placed in the non-fiction section.

She then goes on about folksonomies, noting their oft repeated benefits and detriments, and makes the claim that “philosophical relativism appears to be the underlying philosophy behind folksonomies.” Beyond synonym and typographical errors, it is possible that users might tag an item with directly contrary tags, violating Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Her example, a picture of a white horse could be tagged both “black horse” and “white horse.” In her view this is detrimental to searching and retrieval.

The critique I can give to her position is that classification schemes give only the illusion of order and hierarchy where it doesn’t truly exist. We all know that classifications have their own cultural–i.e. relativist–biases. What we don’t like to admit is that these classification systems come from not only group discussion and agreement amongst professionals, but also the cultural environment where the system is developed. And societies will cover over the fact that the classification systems used to define its reality have no fundamental basis (Foucault). Peterson doesn’t consider the possibility that reality is relativist, thereby making “traditional” classification are static, possibly not reflective of current cultural beliefs, or even the tool of dominate power structures. This is not something I am arguing is true, mind you, but traditional classifications do have their own philosophical problems.

Which is exactly why controlled and natural vocabulary classifications should live together, within one bibliographic record. This is all possible within the OPAC. Not only for the fact that folksonomies can highlight the inherent biases within a classification system, but for the very fact that cataloguers make mistakes, they miss classify, or they miss a subject heading which could apply. And, at the same time, controlled vocabularies can serve as a stable reference point.

However, I think Peterson’s article raises some excellent points for discussion, and I recommend you read it.

I’ve tried searching for books before, but U of T wasn’t ever on the list. It is good, because I can skip all the slow home pages and intermediate search steps and get right to the items I want. I’ve even added a WorldCat search to be Firefox search box, so now I can search my catalogue from anywhere.

PLUS, the results are recognized by Zotero, so I can save everything in one click.

Update: Full Paper below the cut, thanks to latex2rft

6 Summary of Issues and Benefits

6.0.1 Issues

As has been addressed, there are some problems with DSpace. In the first place, the software is open source. While this does come with its own benefits, it also comes with its own problems. Commercial support for the software does not exist at this time, neither for installation nor for later technical issues. Libraries used to working with commercial software or ILS vendors may find implementation difficult. Furthermore, some who have previously implemented the software have had problems with performance while updating files and with the structure of the communities, although these may have been fixed in successive releases of the software.

The major difficulty we have found is with DSpace’s handling of metadata. While we feel that the number of fields in Dublin Core is adequate for most if not all uses (DCMI Usage Board 2006), we are troubled by the lack of authority control when completing its fields. Without some control over uniform titles, authors and subjects accessing the items in the future will very problematic. However, this could be solved at an institutional policy level, with guidelines for submission and librarians or faculty having roles in the “workflow” overseeing metadata. While there is no scope in this paper for a discussion of necessity of controlled vocabulary, we will stress that this necessity does not just apply to paper documents, but to digital ones as well.

6.0.2 Benefits

Despite this fault, we do find that DSpace has many positive aspects. We find it to be an amazingly flexible and robust system which would be ready to handle almost any university’s needs right out of the box. It has the flexibility to handle all types of documents and methods of research, as well as the simplicity to encourage non-technical users towards the Open Access (OA) of scholarly research. We also feel that, given Smith’s intentions as cited above, the system would be an ready for a university to experiment in self-publishing even a part of its faculty’s research. Furthermore, while open source can have its drawbacks, it has some definite benefits. The software itself is customizable from the ground up, and any perceived problems with the system could be fixed by an institution if they so desired. If this were beyond the abilities of the institution, the software is free, has little hardware requirements, and would require little administration for a simple, uncustomized installation.

7 Conclusions

It is the goal of the developer’s of DSpace to make the collection, preservation, indexing and distribution of digital research objects simple (Smith, 2003), to the extent that it encourages researches to self-archive their own work. Despite a few drawbacks that we have noted, particularly with the lack of control over metadata, DSpace is an excellent digital repository system supported by an active community of both users and developers. Given DSpace’s flexibility to archive any type of digital object and deal with any model of research within a department or other research community, it is a highly recommended system which can only improve with further development. This flexibility is increased by the fact that DSpace is open source, and any modifications or improvements can be implemented by the institutions themselves, and those improvements can be shared with the wider research community.

1  Introduction

DSpace is an advanced digital repository system that aims to simplify the long-term archivization and access of digital research objects in any format. DSpace is an open-source, web-based system which can be remotely accessed by submitters, administrators and the general public, and can be modified to suit a particular institution’s needs. Furthermore, while DSpace’s flexibility allows it to be used in a variety of scenarios (“Introducing DSpace” 2006), this paper will examine the usefulness of DSpace as a research repository implemented by the library of a large university for use of its faculty and departments. Here we will examine the installation, implementation, and usage of a DSpace set-up, and address some problems or questions that may arise. A test installation of the software is beyond the scope of this analysis, but reports from other users will be cited. In the end we will conclude that any limitations of DSpace are minor, and that it would be a highly useful tool for any university to implement.

2  Project Summary

DSpace was completed in November 2002 through a joint effort between Hewlett-Packard Labs (HP) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who have released the resulting code under an open-source licence, specifically the permissive BSD license (Smith, 2003). This means that end-users can adjust, modify or improve the code as they see fit, and furthermore the project developers do evaluate and reincorporate any improvements made by users into the main distribution (Smith, 2003). As of this writing the software is hosted on the open-source repository Sourceforge which currently offers version 1.4 of the software, indicating the project is beyond beta testing ready for end-users (“DSpace” 2006). DSpace Federation’s unofficial list has over 100 institutions using DSpace (“DSpaceInstances”2006). We can conclude that the software is well tested and supported by a community of users. However, as the software is open-source, neither MIT nor HP offers official support (Smith, 2003).

The project was designed to be a tool for institutions, in MIT’s case a university, to implement a central location where faculty, departments, disciplines, labs and research centres could store their published and pre-published research for access by others and long-term archivization. The developers claim that the software was build to support “every function that a research organization needs to run a production digital repository service, but as simply as possible” (Smith, 2003). Furthermore, the software was designed to be multidisciplinary: it is designed around the idea of the “Community,” which designs its own work flows and manages its own deposits, which we will examine under “Usage and Institutional Policy.” Communities can be any size, from labs to departments to entire institutes of research (Smith, 2003). 

As well, the repository does not simply archive text as some other e-print servers, but anything that may be part of faculty research. Text, audio and video are the most obvious data formats, but the system will except anything in any format for viewing with the appropriate software: data sets, complex computer models and simulations, even binary software (e.g. .EXE files) (“EndUserFaq”2006). The software goes beyond the needs for eTheses and pre-print servers, although these have been implemented with DSpace (Jones 2004, Nixon2003). The director of the project, MacKenzie Smith, envisions a future where scholarly journals are removed from the publishing process and universities self-pulish faculty research with the help of software like DSpace (“Interview: A journey into DSpace”2003). DSpace is a robust and flexible repository implementation that, with the right policies, will be able to handle any research users would wish to deposit in it.

3  Technology Considerations

3.0.1  Requirements

DSpace is designed to run on a standard UNIX system with minimal resources (Smith, 2003), which should already be in place in most university environments. The system itself is composed of a standard open-source database (PostgreSQL) and web-server (Apache and Tomcat) software. The back end of the service runs on Java, and theoretically it could run on any operating system environment, but this is untested by the developers (Smith, 2003). The DSpace Foundation recommends IT support by someone with both UNIX administration experience and Java programming ability (“DSpace System Manager: Impliment DSpace”2006), although this may only be necessary if an institution were looking to heavily modify their local installation. Given someone familiar with UNIX software installation and networking, a basic system could be installed very quickly and simply (Horsman & Pompe 2005).

3.0.2  Support

While neither MIT nor HP offers official support, there is a very active community around the software, and it is in active development. Beyond the DSpace Wiki <http://wiki.dspace.org> which addresses both technical and non-technical questions, there are also general, technical and development mailing lists at <http://dspace.org/feedback/mailing.html> which are very active and bugs are actively tracked on the Sourceforge site <http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace/> . There may be some issues with universities who are not experienced with the support process regarding open-source software and are more familiar with commercial customer support. Nevertheless, most large university libraries do have IT staff with the recommended level of experience who should be very familiar with open-source software.

4  Usage and Institutional Policy

4.0.1  Submission

After installation the system is accessed through a set of three web-based interfaces (Smith, 2003). One is for the end-users, one for those in the submission process, discussed below, and one for administrators (Smith, 2003). Those formats viewable from within the browser are loaded on demand, with all other formats available for download and viewing with the required software (Smith, 2003). In examining the system from the prospective of a submitter or an administrator, an installation was beyond the scope of this analysis, but we can cite other users’ impressions of the software. Nixon (2003) outlines a seven step process for depositing materials: three Description steps, Upload, Verify, Licence and Complete. These steps are tracked by a progress bar, and the submitter is free to move back and forth between the steps. For ease of use the submitter, who might not be technically inclined, does not have to know the file format of his submission as DSpace analyses the file and assigns an appropriate designation upon upload (Nixon2003). One issue Horsman and Pompe (2005) found was that the upload process was slow, particularly for larger files, although this may have been improved in a successive version. Lastly, the submitter can select a licence for their submission, allowing for the choice of an open-source (i.e. Creative Commons) licence if desired. 

4.0.2  Communities

The submission process itself depends greatly on the policies of a particular “Community” as understood by DSpace. As noted, communities can be of any size, from a small lab to a large institute. They are defined by the internal policies regarding submission and access to the research of that group. Submitters are not bound to a particular community, but they do have to select which community their work will be submitted to (Nixon2003). Users of the system with different levels of involvement work within a community to access the submission and prepare it for archivization, a work not being archived until it goes through the community’s process (Smith, 2003). 

4.0.3  Policy

While it could be the policy of a community to allow any of its faculty to submit papers which are automatically archived, a more complex example may have a group of people designated as reviewers, a member who is responsible for metadata (discussed below) and a project co-ordinator who gives final approval (Smith, 2003). A research object would need to be reviewed and edited according to the community’s policy before it were ultimately archived. Each person with a role in the process can log on to the system to see what objects are at what stage of review, and what action must be taken by the various members of the process. The developers of DSpace call this a “workflow,” (Smith, 2003) and have designed the system to be flexible enough to handle the work flow of all researchers, from sole English professors to complex bio-chemical medical research teams. 

There can be problems, however, with the implementation of communities. Nixon (2003) found the communities too “flat” as sub-communities were not implemented. However, I believe this critique misunderstands the role of the community. Communities are not, primarily, for organization of the archive, which can easily be handled by metadata, but are necessary for the submission process, which can be radically different not only for different departments across the university, but also “sub-communities” within each department. Nevertheless, Nixon (2003) does state that sub-communities were added as of version 1.2 of DSpace.

5  Metadata and Access

5.0.1  Metadata

DSpace archives all research objects under a qualified Dublin Core metadata standard (Smith, 2003). This is recorded at the time of submission, is displayed with the item when accessed, and items can be searched by their metadata by end-users (Nixon 2003). Like all discussions of metadata, however, there are those who require both more and less information. Jones jones2004 found the possible metadata as more than adequate for his uses while Horsman and Pompe horsman2005 found the metadata severely lacking in specificity for archive purposes. Furthermore they found the lack of multilevel description and authority control over vocabulary problematic (Horsman & Pompe 2005). Browsing the University of Toronto’s own “T-Space” repository list of subjects <https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/browse-subject> without a controlled vocabulary and classification scheme proves to be daunting, and searching by subject is very difficult as well. It might be possible for individual communities to control their own vocabulary, but this is not a function of the software itself.

5.0.2  Integration

This standard metadata scheme does allow tight integration between DSpace and other digital repositories, through the implementation of the Open Archives Initiative protocol (Smith, 2003). This allows data submitted to DSpace to be “harvested” by other repositories. For instance, a community working in Library and Information Science, while submitting their papers to their local DSpace repository, might also concurrently submit their work to a OAI compliant pre-print repository such as the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology (DLIST) <http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu> without having to re-upload files or re-enter metadata a second time. This makes the connections between databases very easy and efficient, promoting scholarly interaction beyond the local department or faculty.

5.0.3  Access

Works are accessed by a unique identifier called a “handle,” the goal being to have persistent citations to a particular document or object for as long as possible (Smith, 2003). Handles are organized by a special proxy server which keeps track of handles and their corresponding objects, allowing an item to move or change while retaining the same URL for web-brower access. As already noted, the user’s web-browser will open any formats it recognizes, and any other formats will be downloaded for viewing by the appropriate software. Not only does this allow for secure archivization and cataloguing of materials, but also gives researches direct links to previously read materials and long lasting citations within their own publications for others to follow what they had read. These permanent URLs also facilitate long-term archivization: as file formats and technologies change, those archives which can be translated between formats can retain the same URL, allowing transparent access to users in the distant future (Smith, 2003).

6  Summary of Issues and Benefits

6.0.1  Issues

As has been addressed, there are some problems with DSpace. In the first place, the software is open source. While this does come with its own benefits, it also comes with its own problems. Commercial support for the software does not exist at this time, neither for installation nor for later technical issues. Libraries used to working with commercial software or ILS vendors may find implementation difficult. Furthermore, some who have previously implemented the software have had problems with performance while updating files and with the structure of the communities, although these may have been fixed in successive releases of the software.

The major difficulty we have found is with DSpace’s handling of metadata. While we feel that the number of fields in Dublin Core is adequate for most if not all uses (DCMI Usage Board 2006), we are troubled by the lack of authority control when completing its fields. Without some control over uniform titles, authors and subjects accessing the items in the future will very problematic. However, this could be solved at an institutional policy level, with guidelines for submission and librarians or faculty having roles in the “workflow” overseeing metadata. While there is no scope in this paper for a discussion of necessity of controlled vocabulary, we will stress that this necessity does not just apply to paper documents, but to digital ones as well.

6.0.2  Benefits

Despite this fault, we do find that DSpace has many positive aspects. We find it to be an amazingly flexible and robust system which would be ready to handle almost any university’s needs right out of the box. It has the flexibility to handle all types of documents and methods of research, as well as the simplicity to encourage non-technical users towards the Open Access (OA) of scholarly research. We also feel that, given Smith’s intentions as cited above, the system would be an ready for a university to experiment in self-publishing even a part of its faculty’s research. Furthermore, while open source can have its drawbacks, it has some definite benefits. The software itself is customizable from the ground up, and any perceived problems with the system could be fixed by an institution if they so desired. If this were beyond the abilities of the institution, the software is free, has little hardware requirements, and would require little administration for a simple, uncustomized installation.

7  Conclusions

It is the goal of the developer’s of DSpace to make the collection, preservation, indexing and distribution of digital research objects simple (Smith, 2003), to the extent that it encourages researches to self-archive their own work. Despite a few drawbacks that we have noted, particularly with the lack of control over metadata, DSpace is an excellent digital repository system supported by an active community of both users and developers. Given DSpace’s flexibility to archive any type of digital object and deal with any model of research within a department or other research community, it is a highly recommended system which can only improve with further development. This flexibility is increased by the fact that DSpace is open source, and any modifications or improvements can be implemented by the institutions themselves, and those improvements can be shared with the wider research community.

References

DCMI Usage Board (2006) DCMI metadata terms.  Retrieved November 8 2006 from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative website: http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/.

DSpace (2006).  Retrieved November 8 2006 from Sourceforge website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace/.

DSpaceInstances (2006).  Retrived November 8 2006 from DSpace Wiki: http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/DspaceInstances.

DSpace System Manager: Implement DSpace. (2006).  Retrieved November 8 2006 from DSpace Federation website: http://dspace.org/implement/sys-man.html.

EndUserFaq. (2006).  Retrived November 8 2006 from DSpace Wiki: http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php//EndUserFaq.

Horsman, P. & Pompe, K. (2005). Building a digital archive: A dutch experience. RLG DigiNews, 9(6). Retrieved November 8 2006 from RLG website: http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php? Page_ID=20865#article2.

Interview: A journey into DSpace. (2003), October 20. Open Access Now. Retrieved November 8 2006 from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/? page=features&issue=7.

Introducing DSpace. (2006).  Retrieved November 8 2006 from DSpace Federation website: http://dspace.org/introduction/index.html.

Jones, R. (2004). DSpace vs. ETD-db: Choosing software to manage electronic theses and dissertations. Ariadne(38). Retrieved November 8 2006 from: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/jones/.

Nixon, W. (2003). DAEDALUS: initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow. Ariadne(37). Retrived November 8 2006 from: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/nixon/.

Smith, M., Bass, M., McClellan, G., Tansley, R., Barton, M., Branschofsky, M. (2003). DSpace: an open source dynamic digital repository. D-Lib Magazine, 9(1). Retrieved November 8 2006 from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/smith/01smith.html.

TechnicalFaq. (2006).  Retrived November 8 2006 from DSpace Wiki: http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php//TechnicalFaq.

Have been working on a take home exam for Information and its Social Contexts. There are three questions, each only two double spaced pages. Now, if I was writing this in class, I would look at this as something very easy–bang out a quick outline and just start writing. However, for some reason I can’t make it work. I have a file with three half finished introductions and no desire to finish anything else. This is not the first time this has happened since I started school, and I am beginning to question whether why that is.

i question sometimes whether I work best on the computer. In undergraduate I would often force myself to begin my essay by hand, at least the introduction. I couldn’t seem to get the flow of things when writing on the keyboard. I have a nice fountain pen, and writing on paper seems to allowed things to flow nicely from my head to my fingertips in a way the computer couldn’t.

Don DeLillo writes on a manual typewriter (I have one as well) because he feels that the rhythm is all wrong at the keyboard. It is wonderfully hard to work at a manual typewriter–your finger joints begin to hurt after a while. You have to force things to work.

I find the greatest benefits to writing with pen and typewriter is that it is impossible to write faster than you can think. It is characteristic of contemporary writing for it to be overly wordy, which I think is a function of the computer.

Although I question why I was able to write this post, but not finish even two pages of work.