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Preserving our past

10 February 2003

A joint digital repository project for University and MIT

Cambridge University Library and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries have embarked on a joint project to establish a digital repository for Cambridge University.

The two libraries, working with Cambridge University Computing Service, will jointly receive £1.7 million over two years from the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) in order to install an open source computer system called 'DSpace^TM'.

The project will be led in Cambridge by the University Librarian, Peter Fox, and at MIT by the Director of MIT Libraries, Ann Wolpert.

"For some time we in the University Library have been concerned about the amount of digital material being created in the University apparently without any provision being made for its long-term preservation and access.""DSpace now provides us with the opportunity to offer such a service to our academic colleagues, and we are delighted to have the opportunity of developing it in collaboration with MIT Libraries", said Peter Fox. "The MIT Libraries have great respect for the contributions the Cambridge University Library has already made to the advancement of digital library services. The prospect of collaborating with Peter Fox and his colleagues in both the Library and Computing Service is exciting and most welcome. We look forward to a mutually rewarding project that will further the goals of managing and preserving digital materials for the academy," said Ann Wolpert.

The Cambridge system, to be known as 'DSpace@Cambridge', will have two principal roles. It has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate and preserve digital material created by the academic community, including sdholarly articles and pre-prints, theses, technical reports, archives and other textual material, together with different formats such as multimedia clips, interactive teaching programmes, datasets and databases.

Secondly, it will provide a home for the increasing amount of material that is being digitised from the University Library's collections.

The original MIT initiative grew out of the need to develop effective procedures for handling the digital output of MIT staff to provide a secure long-term home for their digital work.

The project team will be identifying a small number of 'early adopter' communities in the University, to provide content and test the system before it is made widely available. Each user group will be able to customise the DSpace system to meet its own requirements.

Cambridge will also act as example for other higher and further education institutions in the UK and, with MIT and six other North American universities, will form an initial federation of institutions using DSpace and co-ordinating its further development. The system has been made freely available as open source software, and will enable any other institutions to install DSpace.

In a related initiative also funded by the CMI, Cambridge University Library and MIT Libraries have begun to organise a two-year programme of seminars with the aim of assisting higher and further education institutions in the UK to develop plans for implementing their own digital institutional repositories.

Notes for Editors:

DSpace@Cambridge website (www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dspace/), Dspace has been developed over the past two years by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

For more information, contact:

Alison McFarquhar, Press and Publications Office, University of Cambridge. Tel: 01223 332300; e-mail: am353@cam.ac.uk

2.Peter Morgan, Dspace Cambridge Project Director, University Library at the University of Cambridge Tel: 01223 333130; email: pbm2@cam.ac.uk

3. For information on the UK seminar series, contact Ms Mary Barton at MIT Libraries (mbarton@mit.edu) or Ms Rohan Holley at Cambridge University Library (rh300@cam.ac.uk).

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