OR 2010: day three

getting practical

Historically, the OR conference starts with two days of general material, and then switches to user group meetings that attendees choose to go to based on their repository software of choice. As a result, today was DSpace, DSpace, DSpace.

I swear today's short post is not a cop-out. No, it is not. It is just that today's information really wasn't anything entirely new. The perhaps earthshattering news was that DuraSpace has long-range plans to develop DSpace and Fedora so that DSpace can actually sit on top of Fedora, if you will, taking advantage of the flexibility one can have with Fedora, but still achieving the DSpace turnkey solution. This is several years off, but it's also the first acknowledgment that the two software packages will, inevitably, merge under the new organization. But it's a long ways off, and nothing that I feel I need to worry about at the moment.


lunch

Smoked salmon, fried pork, and a giant chocolate mousse, topped with conversation about living in Boston (two of my table mates live in the Boston area) and New England in general. It was a good lunch.


user group session: DSpace 1.6

A nice show and tell of the statistics package in 1.6; it is so beautiful and informative compared to the University of Minho package our institution currently uses. The upgrade will feel positively luxurious. It even shows the different numbers for which specific bitstreams are downloaded.

And if that wasn't enough to make an institution want to upgrade their software, there was a presentation detailing an institution's upgrade from 1.3 to 1.6. When making that large a leap, they had to plan for several months to determine what customizations would continue to work, and indeed, which ones they might not even need any more.


user group session: DSpace repository manager session

To be honest, the only new information presented in this session was how the batch metadata editing feature works in DSpace 1.6. This is also a fabulous to-die-for feature that is definitely worth the update. It was followed by two rather elementary presentations on how DSpace works "under the hood" and how the development team is organized and how you can contribute; all of this would have been absolutely illuminating, transcending information to have had last year, when our institution was just starting to implement DSpace, but is now old hat.

With respect to the presenters, however, it is necessary to do this every year. There were definitely new implementers, or potential DSpace implementers, in the room who were very interested in the presentation. Perhaps in future years it should be titled "DSpace for newbies" or something like that.

Sitting in this very large auditorium surrounded by repository managers and developers reviewing the down-and-dirty of DSpace, I am reminded of how much DSpace implementation and upkeep is truly is a collaborative effort that should be taken on not just by a repository manager (usually a librarian) or a developer (usually someone from the IT department) but both parts of the whole. To truly have an effective DSpace instance that does what the particular institution's end-users need, the effort must be a collaborative one. A repository will not be effective or sustainable in the long term without this collaboration.