Business Plan

Each university that implements DSpace will devise its own service offering and business plan for their DSpace initiative. The MIT Libraries has developed a business plan for their DSpace service that reflects the unique organizational and technical infrastructure of the Institute.

As you begin to build this new type of library service, it’s important to do some business planning to analyze your potential costs upfront. Depending on the size and scope of your DSpace service, you may want to find ways to recover those costs to support the level of service you want to offer.

The MIT DSpace team developed a Business Planning presentation (PowerPoint) you can use to learn more about the business issues associated with running a DSpace service.

Use the MIT Libraries’ DSpace Business Plan (pdf) as a reference for your planning process. It covers the following key areas:

• DSpace Distribution License
• Service Description
• Service Delivery
• Building Awareness and Driving Adoption
• Financial Model

Also included in this document is a survey of Lessons Learned, which illustrates some of the challenges the MIT DSpace team faced in building their service.