DSpace Position Paper - HP Labs

Robert Tansley, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. 21 July 2004

HP has been closely involved in the development of DSpace since the start of the project in 2000. DSpace started out as a joint HP and MIT project to build a functioning platform for capturing the born-digital intellectual output of MIT. Since its release to the wider community in November 2002, DSpace has attracted a remarkable amount of interest, and has been adopted by numerous organisations around the globe.

HP wishes to play a continuing role in further developing the DSpace platform. HP's principal focus in DSpace is in researching and developing scalable technologies for digital preservation. To this end, our main goals are:

• Establishing an active open source community around DSpace. We believe the open source model is the best way to promote widespread adoption of DSpace, attracting contribution from the best in the field of digital preservation and other related fields. Open source and standards-based software, understood by many, avoids the common problem of 'vendor lock-in' that hampers the goal of digital preservation.

• Moving DSpace to a more modular architecture. This will enable DSpace to be more easily customised to particular organisations and situations, and allows a much wider community to work on DSpace independently. It will also allow much easier development and testing of experimental tools for digital preservation.

• Exploring digital preservation issues, processes, techniques and technologies. In our view, DSpace is primarily a system for the long-term stewardship and preservation of digital materials. We are interested in exploring and working with the digital preservation research community to explore and specify preservation information models, metadata standards and tools.

• Exploring issues around managing the preservation of large-scale repositories. As more and more of the intellectual output of the world is 'born digital', it is clear we will have to be able to preserve huge quantities of digital material. We are interested in using DSpace as a vehicle for exploring technologies and strategies to deal with a number of dimensions of scale, including large numbers of objects, objects that are themselves large and complex, and large numbers of users.

We believe all of the above goals are best served by concentrating on moving DSpace to the proposed 'version 2.0' architecture as soon as possible. This is where our efforts will henceforth be focussed.