Topic misrepresented, and what you don't see (Score 4, Informative)

Maybe I should've been a little more wordy in the original post; I'm afraid the focus of these stories has been mostly misrepresented. FYI also, I helped work on the development of DSpace, so I'm biased, but since I no longer work there my remarks in no way should be taken as representing their official viewpoint. :)

The collaborative effort of the institutions mentioned, and the stories posted, are not primarily focused on courseware (although they are explicitly intended to support long-term storage and access to courseware materials). The goal of these efforts, which in these stories surround the DSpace project specifically, is to extend the range of services provided by these institutions, more specifically their libraries, to incorporate a scaleable model of digital shelf space. In other words, these are infrastructure efforts (so if you really are impressed by that part, don't bother reading on!).

At MIT Libraries, for instance, the main focus of their DSpace implementation is to capture the digital products of research conducted within the MIT community. This includes articles, books, technical reports, theses, datasets, audio files, videos, images, maps, and so on. Much like the existing physical library buildings and collections, these are to be organized according to how they can best serve the departments, labs, schools, and research centers at the Institute, which the new exception being that at first DSpace will focus on capturing materials generated locally, rather than selecting and collecting materials produced externally. Or worse, research materials that are generated locally by people at MIT, then given to publishers, and then sold back to the libraries at great cost. So from an infrastructure perspective, what they are trying to achieve is to extend the range of what libraries provide in terms of collections and services to now also include all kinds of digital materials, starting especially with digital materials created at MIT.

A few examples illustrate this best: first, consider the junior faculty member with her own articles on her department web page. We've all seen such web pages disappear within 1-3 years. What happens to her colleagues at other institutions who lose access to her articles, which maybe never got published in traditional outlets, but are nonetheless vital to their own work, and thereafter are reduced to so many broken bookmarks? At MIT, DSpace will take stewardship of those materials, giving them a persistent url and carefully recording descriptive, technical, and preservation metadata about the files and their formats. So in this case, DSpace takes that 1-3 year period of unreliable access and extends it to a minimum of 3-7 years of predictably reliable access. At this point in the web's history, you can't really get that anywhere else, and there's every reason to hope that number will really reach into the decades; it just can't be promised reasonably today.

A second example: an interactive, multimedia, experiential web resource administered by some professor on an aging redhat 6.0 machine under their desk. It's rich in data, it demonstrates a breakthrough in the state of the art, or the idea, in some nascent discipline, and it's widely used by scholars of that discipline, and it _can't_ be "just printed out". What happens when that machine blows a partition, or is comprimised because its amateur sysadmin is really a scholar, not a wizard?

Obviously, as indicated in the story, a good third example is courseware materials. If you look closely at OCW or the other well-known examples thereof, you'll see that in many ways, they are (IMHO) foremost publishing ventures serving the educational process. Getting the materials into standard form, getting them delivered by a deadline, keeping them viable during their relevant terms. Doing this so openly, and freely, is indeed very exciting. But every term that comes up introduces new classes, new upkeep, etc., and you have to have an answer for where the materials from the previous semesters' courses are going to land. There has to be infrastructure support for that, and having a service in the libraries providing long term persistent storage and access to do just that is an awfully good answer, if the tools, policies, and budget are in place to do that.

These examples were much better articulated by several of the excellent speakers at yesterday's launch event (sorry, couldn't find a link), and are increasingly recognized as very common and very troubling scenarios across academia. Once you think about what the technological requirements of providing that infrastructure are, it quickly comes clear that such initiative require solid, reliable software with lucid, maintainable designs, and no magic. After all, you could do it with just a filesystem, right? :) To get the services delivered properly, and in a way scholars can trust, however, you have to focus on developing policy, procuring budget, and delivering on an mission-driven focus of getting the service right and keeping it running. In other words, what you don't see behind the systems is the amount of non-technical work behind getting these things going, and making them sustainable.

The focus of the multi-institutional efforts is to expand, replicate, and formalize approaches to doing the same at many other large institutions where the impact can be equally significant. Seeing the level of public and private support of these efforts, and that there's a line in the sand now drawn with a software release marking a reliable starting point to answering the technical question, is quite exciting, and indeed is a breakthrough. If you really still think nothing new is being offered, and that DSpace isn't more than a stripped down sourceforge thinking like a card catalog, send me email and I'll direct your attention to a few folks at MIT and HP who will blow your mind with how well they've thought through and planned for these problems. :)