Anonymous Patron writes “Washington Square News says NYU’s library system has announced plans to develop software for an intercollegiate database that will make archival processing more efficient, a library official said.
The system, called “The Archivists’ Toolkit,” will allow universities and other research institutions to compile their archives into a online database, making the scholarship available worldwide.
Sounds like Dspace to me!”
NOT another Dspace
Okay, librarians: you need to understand that archivists don’t do things the same way that you do.
This software is being designed by archivist to accomodate the eccentricities of the archivist’s world. Dspace is designed to enable repositories of digitally published works. This are two quite different activities.
For more information about who archivists are and what they do that is different from librarians, start with this link:
http://archivists.org/ …sorry, but I just really do get tired of being “Defender of The Realm” sometimes, when it comes to talk about archives…
Re:NOT another Dspace
I can’t get enough from the article to know enough about the new system, but I know dspace quite well, and I’d have to say that it sounds alot like dspace as well.
What dspace is designed to do and what it can do are not the same thing.
Re:NOT another Dspace …blame it on the writer. The whole thing has been “dummied down” for a general level of readership that doesn’t appreciate the differences in what archivists do in processing their collections versus what librarians do…and the general public is doing good to understand what librarians do.
Blake, you’re a absolutely correct in saying that one “cant’ get enough from the article to know enough about the new system”
The key words in the article (if we can believe it) are the software will “make archival processing more efficient”…which is something actually quite specific. David Mattison quotes one of the original press releases for the project that provides considerably more detail about the actual project: http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress/index.php?p= 675
There is a website for the project (http://euterpe.bobst.nyu.edu/toolkit/), but no, I haven’t downloaded the PDF or Word.DOC file for the proposal.
What the DSpace website says about DSpace (“DSpace is a groundbreaking digital library system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves and redistributes the intellectual output of a university’s research faculty in digital formats.Developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP), DSpace is now freely available to research institutions worldwide as an open source system that can be customized and extended.”) makes it pretty clear that these are two separate and not equal endeavors. AS for the capacity of DSpace to encompass the needs of a processing arrchivist, with enough monkeys typing, I’m sure it could do the job, but it would still be a hack.
Quoting from the release on David’s site: “Currently, there is nothing akin to a library management system tailored to the needs of archival repositories, nor is it feasible for many archives to keep up to date with today’s evolving and complex metadata standards.”
DSpace is not a library management system, and that is more what the Toolkit is about…
Hope this is clear as mud now…