January 2004–December 2006
MIT wished to use its OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative to publish all its course materials as static course Web sites, available for free access worldwide, and to make course material available to scholars and instructors for inspiration and reuse. DSpace, MIT’s institutional publication archive, makes that adaptation and reuse of materials possible with its professionally managed, structured, and sustainable digital archiving system, rather than the ad hoc methods that were used earlier.
As a result of this iCampus project, OpenCourseWare is now automatically archived to DSpace, using standards for content packaging as well as Web Services, and this valuable educational content is now under professional management for preservation over archival time frames. It can now also be disseminated from DSpace via a growing number of mechanisms, including work developed on the CWSpace project: Packager Plugins for Import/Export, an Application Profile for use of both METS and IMS Content Packages, and Web Services (WebDAV as well as SOAP) implemented on top of DSpace, called the “Lightweight Network Interface” (LNI).
Central to this project was the development of a new standard for tagging Web sites and learning objects to maximize preservation, as well as the implementation of ways to harvest content from OCW, using Microsoft Content Management System. The new approaches and standards that DSpace has applied to organization issues involving long-term archiving, content management, and Web publishing will ensure that valuable course materials from MIT will be optimized to achieve the highest-impact, longest-lasting results, both at MIT and worldwide.
Read More about CWSpace: Interoperation Among Teaching Tools & Digital Archives
Investigators: Ann Wolpert, MIT Director of Libraries; MacKenzie Smith, MIT Libraries Assoc. Director for Technology; William Reilly, Technical Analyst, Digital Library Research Group