Week 7

I have had a week of discouragements in regards to DSpace installation as my late posts can attest. My beloved laptop has had sudden battery problems . The phone company has done a lot of repair work in my neighborhood after a big storm that has meant random internet blackout periods. And I am missing something about DSpace. Intellectually I understand the hierarchical nature of the DSpace setup but it is not a natural fit. When I try to apply those principles of organization to my digital collection it does not work well. I struggled to pick a collection at the beginning of the semester and still feel that it is not well formed. My conceptualization is not very firm as I don’t have any practical experience to draw off of. In previous posts I have been quite critical of dull or not very relevant collections being chosen for digital projects by institutions as being a cop-out. I still think that but I have new appreciation for the difficulties inherent in the process.

On more positive notes, the readings for Unit 7 were both very interesting. I appreciate the perspective the Stanford authors laid out as to the successes and failures of a major digital repository. It gave a new sense of the speed of change the digital reservation community is experiencing. The Johns reading about the context of repository software design gave insight into the root causes of differences between systems. The Greenstone open-source system is one I particularly find interesting because of its focus on multilingualism. The New Zealand Digital Library Project and the University of Waikato developed the project and a partnership with UNESCO has helped make it an international community. A phrase from the website has particular resonance regarding increasing the “awareness of the social implications of information technology”. This is brought home by the use of Greenstone for bilingual digital collections for minority languages at risk of extinction, as the New Zealand project has included Maori, there are others in Welsh, Kazakh, Hawaiian and more. It pleases me to see a digital library have two preservation roles to play. The Greenstone project also focuses on its interoperability with OAI-PMH and METS. It is also able to import and export collections with DSpace. How that works is something I will be interested in exploring further.