Re: DSpace in Iraq?

Hi Dan,

You're correct that www-rdf-dspace is really the SIMILE list now, although 
there's been some discussion about the branding confusion that entails... 
it could change at some point. But where DSpace is concerned it's the 
dspace-general and dspace-tech lists that get all the action. The DSpace 
community is usually pretty generous with its time in answering technical 
questions and getting people started. The dspace-tech list is active and 
all the developers subscribe and respond. I don't know that it makes sense 
for me, or anyone else who works on DSpace at MIT, to offer to personally 
assist Sara Al-Assam, but given the importance of this work I'm sure we'll 
be happy to help with questions as much as we can.

There is a working version of the system in Turkey, but I don't know of any 
that use Arabic (it should deal with it ok, at least for input and display, 
although indexing and searching right-to-left or mixed direction languages 
is always exciting so this may be more of a Lucene question than a DSpace 
one). Other than that, their use of the system shouldn't raise many issues 
we haven't seen before in India, China and other developing areas of the world.

MacKenzie


At 02:22 PM 5/19/2004 -0400, Dan Brickley wrote:
>I've been reading around the IT aspects of reconstruction in Iraq, and
>came across a mention of DSpace in the background slides for a
>(cancelled) meeting about the establishment of an "Internet
>informational network for Iraq's institutes of HE and research".
>
>http://www.escwa.org.lb/information/iraq/IPR/main.html
>http://www.escwa.org.lb/information/iraq/workshops/13apr/onlinereourcesv1.0.pdf
>
>I've swapped brief emails with Sara Al-assam, one of the authors of that
>document. It sounds to me as if DSpace is worth investigating in that
>context, so I thought I'd drop a note here to see if anyone might have
>time/energy to help with use of DSpace in Iraq. Since the tools are
>opensource, they could just grab them and get started, but I expect that
>assistance of various kinds would be useful and welcomed.
>
>Ah, it seems I didn't know about the dspace-general and dspace-tech lists.
>Maybe I ought've asked there, but I'm more used to this list. If
>anyone's interested in following this up, do get in touch...
>
>I guess the initial practicalities to investigate are the extent of
>internationalisation support in DSpace (Arabic text ok?), and the
>ability to localise messages etc., in the UI. I understand from
>http://www.dspace.org/implement/sys-man.html that a certain amount of
>local  systems support is also typically needed; I'm wondering what 
>additional
>(technical) issues might be encountered if using this in Iraq.
>
>cheers,
>
>Dan
>
>ps. if I should be treating www-rdf-dspace as "the SIMILE list" now, let
>me know; I could get http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-dspace/
>updated with pointers to other fora too...

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-308
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie@mit.edu

Received on Monday, 24 May 2004 14:07:06 UTC