Robyn Ward Solutions Paper #2

Robyn Ward Networking 846 Solutions Paper #2 The First Unitarian Church of Portland established in 1866 has a rich collection of information regarding Unitarian and Portland history. The Church has a liberal tradition of involvement concerning social justice in the Portland area. The collections of the Church are located in their downtown building held in their library and archives. The Church currently has a web presence but would like to make both their library and archival collections available to not only their members but to a broader public as well. Ministers and congregants have contributed significantly to intellectual output and research. Sermons, addresses, correspondence, and lectures represent a significant part of this intellectual output. With the advent of the Web, more and more of this intellectual output have been born digitally and been made available on their website. It is the intent of the Church to be able to manage these current digital assets and past collections in a digital Institutional Repository. The collection includes minister/church publications, historical photographs, books and manuscripts, video and audio recordings and three-dimensional objects. A main focus for the Church archives is the preservation and access of these materials. Key factors that were considered when looking at the software options for the Institutional Repository were: 1) Digital preservation of materials for future use (including maintenance, storage, migration, and disaster recovery), 2) Access to content (which includes digitization, descriptive metadata and search interfaces), and 3) Inexpensive software that is easy to setup and maintain. For the Institutional Repository two open-source software options were considered: DSpace and Greenstone. Both systems were developed to make it easy for organizations to build their own digital libraries. Greenstone was developed by the New Zealand Digital Library

Project at the University of Waikato and is distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. Hewlett-Packard Labs developed DSpace as a noncommercial product for MIT libraries. DSpace is used for building institutional repositories for research institutions and is good at capturing, storing, indexing, preserving and redistributing digital research materials. Both are highly flexible and customizable and address a number of different needs. In a very basic comparison, Greenstone supports individual collections composed of different types of documents and metadata representing static collections. DSpace on the other hand, supports institutions in capturing and disseminating the intellectual output of an institution and then preserves that output forever. The table below represents a feature comparison of DSpace and Greenstone. Feature

DSpace

Greenstone

URL

http://www.dspace.org

http://www.greenstone.org/cgibin/library

Platforms

Unix and Mac OS/X

Runs on Windows computers, Unix, and Mac OS/X

Interoperability

Is OAI-PMH compliant and defines metadata standards based on Dublin Core for interoperability

Complete Interoperability - uses current standards. It has the ability to interact with two or more systems/metadata schemes. It can export and import data over OAI-PMH

Scripting Language

Java

C++, Perl, Java

Language

English

35 different languages (Five core languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian and Kazakh)

Technical Support

Designed for institutional use where computing facilities and competent software/network

Designed to be used by anyone with basic computer-literacy skills. Provides online support.

support is already in place. Does provide a listserv/discussion list. Preservation

Designed for long-term preservation; it stores preservation metadata and includes a scheme

Is not explicitly designed for long-term preservation

Metadata Standards

Imposes a single metadata standard (Dublin Core), but recent versions allow users to define their own metadata formats by using XML input forms

Dublin Core but also allows for authors to use own metadata scheme

Document Formats

Plug-ins for PDF, XML, HTML, RTF, Plain Text, Excel, PPT. Also supports text, audio, video and images

Plug-ins for PDF, XML, HTML, RTF, Plain Text, Excel, PPT. Also supports text, audio, video and images

User Base

Institutions (Colleges and Universities)

Institutions, organizations and libraries in 70 different countries

Interface

Provides a generic design that can be customized but not by end-users

Two interactive interfaces: One for users (Reader Interface) that operate within a web browser and a librarian interface that is Java-based graphical interface that is easy for download from the web. The Interface an be designed, customized, and built by end-users

Systems

Apache Web server, Tomcat Servlet engine and Postgre

Apache Web server, C++ complier and MySQL database, Perl

SQL relational database Licensing

BSD License

GNU General Public License

Browsing and Searching

Easy to use

Easy to use

Cost

Only in Time (downloading, installing, maintaining, training)

Only in Time (downloading, installing, maintaining, training)

It was difficult to decide which product would best benefit the archive. Both have comparable features. DSpace would be a good choice because of the long-term preservation functionalities but Greenstone was ultimately chosen for the following reasons. It best fit the small environment of the Church archives and library because of it ease of installation and maintenance. The Church does not offer a platform that will support DSpace. The current collection focus for the archives was to provide digital access to existing collections. The static nature of Greenstone was not a drawback at this point. Greenstone meets the second consideration for digital access of collections. During the research for this analysis an article that discussed bringing Greenstone and DSpace together was considered. It offered a solution for bridging the two systems through easy migration from one to the other or to continue with a combination of both. This is something to keep an eye on for development within the archives and can possibly address the long-term preservation question.

References

Dahl, M., Banerjee, K., Spalti, M. (2006). Digital libraries: Integrating content and systems. Oxford, England: Chandos Publishing. Sing, S. N., Ngurtinkhuma, R. K., & Singh, P. K. (2007). Open source software: A comparative study of Greenstone and DSpace. Retrieved October 23, 2007 from http://dspace.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/1944/517 Witten, I. H., Bainbridge, D., Tansley, R., Huang, C., & Don, K. J. (September 2005). StoneD: A bridge between Greenstone and DSpace. D-Lib Magazine, 11 (9). Retrieved October 23, 2007 from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/witten/09witten.html