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Google and DSpace have embarked on a pilot program designed to allow universities to better manage their intellectual output. DSpace is an open source repository system co-developed by MIT and Hewlett-Packard that allows universities to manage, store, and distribute their intellectual property in a digital format.

According to an article on econtentmag.com, there are currently 125 participating DSpace universities, each maintaining their own separate and distinct repositories. DSpace allows each of these universities to manage and more importantly, search through the contents of their repositories. The limitation to this point has been the fact that though universities search through their own respective materials easily enough, there wasn't any means to search across the materials of other universities -that's where Google comes in. Google and DSpace have launched a pilot program with 17 DSpace universities in an effort to develop a system of search across all the separate DSpace repositories.

Providing that the pilot program goes well, you could see the DSpace search become another option for searching in Google. DSpace has however, not committed to any exclusive arrangement with Google nor have they ruled out the development of their own programs.

Mike is a manager at iEntry. He has been with iEntry since 2000.