The Future of Archiving

DSpace, an open-source digital repository system created by MIT and Hewlett-Packard, has been adopted by dozens of organizations and educational institutions since its software became available for download in late 2002. In March, MIT brought together representatives from 50 early adopters to talk about their experiences with the archiving program, which can be used to store academic material in many forms-as documents, audio and video files, or Web pages, for instance.

Presenters included representatives from Cornell University, which is using DSpace to make new scholarly books available online for free, and from the University of Edinburgh, which is using DSpace to digitally preserve theses and dissertations. According to Mackenzie Smith, MIT Libraries associate director for technology and organizer of the meeting, one unforeseen advantage of having DSpace distributed so widely is the emergence of customized versions of the program. The University of Edinburgh modified DSpace so that professors can edit their students' theses online. Smith says this has led to upgrades including changes in the program's user interface and methods for preserving the accessibility of different file formats over time.

Despite the project's success, Smith says a challenge will be finding ways to make users more comfortable with the technology. "We need space to keep experimenting with things, finding ways to make this easier for people," she says.