DSPace: The Card Catalog of the Future?

We had to write a paper about DSpace, a technology which allows users to store information online. I liked it. Here are my official conclusions.

Recommendations & Conclusions

DSpace is a useful tool for our university library system. It could help better integrate the learning resources of our school, and provide easier access to them for students. It could also be helpful for professors who wish to collect a more complete picture of their research- they could integrate and store data sets, research notes, paper drafts and correspondence all on one software platform. For our team of librarians, DSpace offers a unique opportunity to create clearer and more complete metadata linkages and provide more comprehensive information to users. The board should absolutely consider implementing DSpace at our library.

In order to do this, two steps must now occur. First, our library system ought to implement a pilot project, where a selected group of users, representing the make up of our stakeholders- professors, staff, programmers, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students- should be recruited to test out DSpace at our school. Professors could upload content, students could access it etc, and through this process it could be determined how good a fit DSpace is for our community, and our programmers and librarians could being the process of tailoring the interface to best fit our institution’s needs.

If the board decides to move forward with DSpace, it should take on part of the responsibility of promoting it. As a prestigious group of stakeholders, the board has the power to influence our community to make use of DSpace, which is important because the system can only be as useful as the information loaded into it.

In conclusion, I highly recommend DSpace as a tool for our library system. It has been designed for use in and academic library setting, and because it can be reprogrammed to suit our specific needs, it can be customized to our community fairly easily. The benefits of DSpace far outweigh the costs of implementing it.