Marcy Rosenkrantz gave an overview of the DSpace project and its implementation at Cornell. She explained that it was a software system designed to support an institutional repository, of which there are two are Cornell. These institutional repositories are designed for the storage of materials such as grey literature, datasets, and technical reports.
DSpace was developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard and is now available as an open source system modified to meet the needs of any institution. It can store a number of different digital objects, including text files, audio, and images. It will preserve these objects for retrieval on a continuing basis.
DSpace is organized into communities, collections, and objects. For example, Cornell University Library could be a community, Cornell Library Historical Mathematics Monographs could be a collection within that community, and the digital version of George Johnston Allman's Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid could be a object within that collection.
Rosenkrantz explained how communities and collections could be created within DSpace and showed how digital objects could be submitted to the collections. Users submitting a digital object to a collection are prompted to enter a number of different pieces of metadata describing the object before they submit it. The digital object is tied to its metadata description with a digital object identifier (DOI). In addition, users can create metadata descriptions for the digital objects in a collection and submit those descriptions to DSpace all at once in batch mode.
After introducing the concept of a institutional repository, explaining the concepts of communities, collections, and objects within DSpace, and explaining how digital objects could be submitted to the repository, Rosenkrantz took a number of questions from the audience. These questions pertained to such things as the uses DSpace would have at Cornell, how it would fit in with the other institutional repositories already in existence at Cornell, and how it would facilitate the preservation of digital objects stored in it.
