This week I've seen several references to DSpace pop up in my RSS reader - several of which were related to the University of Arizona's DLearn project. DLearn is essentially a Learning Object Repository that looks (and sounds!) very much as though it's based on DSpace. Although it's also registered on the DSpaceInstances Wiki the DLearn site doesn't declare the underlying technology in an 'About DLearn' section, which is a pity. It was a little disappointing to see so little content in the DLearn repository, but in fairness I am well aware that faculty buy-in does not happen overnight.
I subsequently came across another, rather relevant article (entitled 'Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories'), which documented the University of Rochester's own implementation of DSpace (as an Institutional Repository rather than as a LOR), and described their efforts to secure faculty buy-in. The article starts of by highlighting some interesting figures:
“An April 2004 survey of 45 IRs found the average number of documents to be only 1,250 per repository, with a median of 290. This is a small number when considering the hundreds of thousands of dollars and staff hours that go into establishing and maintaining an IR. For example, MIT Libraries estimate that their IR will cost $285,000 annually in staffing, operating expenses and equipment escrow. With approximately 4,000 items currently in their IR, that is over $71 spent per item, per year“.
Ouch!
The report goes on to outline the process and results of a year long research project by the University of Rochester, which aimed to more clearly understand the needs of faculty and to identify ways in which their IR could complement the existing working practices of staff in a research intensive institution.
The researchers established that the benefits of the IR were largely misunderstood by faculty, an issue which was not helped by the use of terminology which, it was wrongly assumed, was understood. Through interviews with staff they drew up a wish-list of priorities, many of which were centred upon the authoring, archiving and sharing of information.
With faculty priorities clarified, they set about enhancing the IR to meet the needs of their intended users. It is worth pointing out, however that several of these priorities could not be met initially. DSpace has not been designed to handle workflow processes such as versioning and co-authorship for example - comments that Arizona's DLearn initiative has also received. Nevertheless, the University of Rochester has begun to make some interesting enhancements to their implementation of DSpace.
Staff in a research led institution naturally want to improve the processes associated with it. They want to make their own work easily accessible and searchable on the web, to be able to control who sees it, and they want to protect it from accidental loss. They don't however want to have to do anything complicated in order to achieve this. In order to make the IR more relevant to the needs of these individuals, Rochester has added another level to the DSpace structure. The addition, (known as a Researcher Page), is essentially a personal web page which acts as a directory of expertise for each member of staff. On their personalised Researcher Page, staff can showcase their research and can link to other publications held in subject repositories and electronic journals.
Behind the Research Pages is a simple interface through which faculty can upload and manage their documents (called the Research Tools page). There are no steep learning curves to deal with, and because staff can appreciate that there are personal benefits to using the system (as well as benefits to the institution), Rochester have effectively incentivised greater use of the IR.
As the report goes on to say:
“We believe that if we support the research process as a whole, and if faculty members find that the product meets their needs and fits their way of work, they will use it, and “naturally” put more of their work into the IR”.
It will be interesting to see how this project pans out, and to see whether Rochester's considerable efforts in this area do indeed increase uptake of the IR. They are planning to further develop their implementation of DSpace in line with the priorities identified by their staff, and are intending to make the Researcher Page and its associated tools available as open source, as and when they are satisfied with them.
