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Note: This is the conclusion to an evaluation written regarding Dspace. The document was addressed to the chief librarian of a fictional Canadian university called “MacDonald University”
Dspace is an excellent digital repository system that is worthy of further study. The program meets all of the Library’s fundamental check list of requirements: customizable, flexibility (able to accept different kinds of media formats), penetration (in use by many university libraries, including about a dozen in Canada) and cost (software is free, storage hardware is fairly cheap). The flexibility of the system in terms of language, type of digital materials, access (via a web browser) and security make it very attractive. If used extensively by faculty, Dspace would facilitate the institutional goal of facilitating research and promotes the library’s goal of disseminating information widely. Further, MacDonald University may want to consider granting access to other parts of the university community such as graduate students; otherwise it may give the impression that only faculty perform research worthy of being disseminated. Prior to adopting this system, it is recommended to survey Canadian universities presently using the software – this would offer a fairly low cost of method of doing a usability study. Given the fact that most publications discussing Dspace only vaguely discuss its potential rather than its actual uses, this is an important question.
The most important problem to resolve is one of policy. Given that MacDonald University has not previously used open source software to any significant degree, the library needs to liaise with the university’s computing support department on how the institution develop policies for open source applications which may not have the same type of support available in commercial software. Further, existing university contracts with other software and hardware vendors need to be evaluated to see if there are any restrictions on implementing open source software.
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