Stuart Lewis’ Blog

This afternoon we (the JISC-funded Repositories Support Project) formally launched ‘The DSpace Course‘ - a creative commons licensed course for new DSpace repository administrators and developers.

There are currently 20 modules, and a Live CD that can be used for the training. The course is designed to be taught by a trainer, and used in a mix-and-match way so that courses can be designed around the attendees and their desired outcomes. Each module has a set of slides and a student workbook.

We’d be glad to receive any feedback on the course in order to improve it!

The press release says:

Today the JISC-funded Repositories Support Project (http://rsp.ac.uk/) have formally launched a modular training course for DSpace - “The DSpace Course“. The course materials have been published with a Creative Commons licence in order to facilitate their re-use.

The course is suitable for DSpace administrators and developers, with the choice of modules being dependent on the people taking the course. The course tutor can mix-and-match the modules to create a custom course. Each module comes with a set of PowerPoint slides, and an associated student workbook. The course has been successfully taught in the UK and Italy.

There are 20 modules in the course, with more modules due to be added soon. The modules include:

 - An Introduction to DSpace

 - How to Get Help

 - Repository Structure

 - Identifiers

 - DSpace Configuration

 - User management and authentication options

 - Metadata Input Customisation

 - Look and Feel Customisation

 - Language Customisation

 - Item Submission Workflows

 - Import and Export

 - Configuring LDAP

 - Upgrading from 1.4. to 1.5

In addition to the course materials the RSP has released a DSpace ‘Live CD’.

The CD allows any PC to be used as training machine with a copy of DSpace pre-installed, along with all of the files required to perform a new installation. 

The CD is inserted into a computer upon boot, and will load a live version of the DSpace software without installation to the hard drive. Upon completion of the training course, remove the CD and the normal operating system will be loaded upon restart of the PC. 

The course materials can be downloaded from:

 - http://hdl.handle.net/2160/615

The Live CD can be downloaded from:

 - http://hdl.handle.net/2160/563

The course has been written by Stuart Lewis (DSpace committer, developer and trainer), Chris Yates (DSpace developer, support provider and trainer) and has benefited from input by Claudia Jürgen (DSpace committer, developer and trainer).

For help and support, please direct all enquiries related to the course to support@rsp.ac.uk.

In addition, the support team may be able to put you in touch with suitable trainers who could teach the course in your area.

Yesterday I spent the day with a colleague delivering a training day aimed at new or potential DSpace administrators as part of my role working with the Repositories Support Project (known as the RSP).

We had a fun, interesting and busy day talking about DSpace, but a few hiccups along the way.

With each event we run, we learn new things about planning and delivering events. Whilst we’ve never had a bad event, there have been issues from time to time. With this event, the main issue was the hardware provided to us in the training suite at New Horizons in Birmingham. The staff were great, and the facilities good, the food was excellent, but the PCs were, ummm, a little on the old side! We were teaching DSpace, which is a pice of server software, so requires quite a bit of ‘infrastructure’ in terms of software requisities. Each trainee had their own PC with a copy of DSpace installed so that they had their own copy to mess about with, configure, and populate. To make this a little easier, we used the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

So when we combined Ubuntu (not a lightweight distro) with Postgres, Java, Tomcat, and Cocoon, lets just say that the poor 7 year old Pentium 866’s with 256 MB of RAM couldn’t quite cope. In fact, they couldn’t cope at all! Our other problem was that we’d configured the machines to launch Firefox as soon as they booted, so that the users were presented with DSpace straight away. Firefox had two tabs opened automatically upon startup, one for the JSP interface, and one for Manakin the XML interface. This meant that Tomcat then had to startup these web applications, at which point the whole machine came unusable and started swapping like crazy.

Our solution was to run round each machine and delete the more resource intensive Manakin user interface, and teach the course using the JSP interface instead. Even then, the machines were slow, so we had a lot of the trainees using one of our test servers back in the office instead.

So what is the lesson to be learnt from this?

Make sure you agree (in writing) the spec of the machines that you’ll be provided with at a training suite.

It sounds obvious, and we were probably just naive to assume that a PC training company would have machines that weren’t quite so old. But we live and learn, and have now negotiated a better room for our next course. Now to get the agreement in writing….