Steelcase captures corporate heritage in DSpace | atmire

“Steelcase Inc., a global leader in the office furniture industry, celebrated its centennial anniversary on March 16, 2012. The anniversary was the driving force for hiring Reagan Marketing + Design, LLC in 2009 to develop, implement and recommend best practices for a digital repository. Goals for the endeavor included the creation of a globally accessible system that would preserve and allow access to the corporation’s heritage materials, was quick-to-implement, user friendly, and provided secure access to many items housing intellectual property. After careful consideration, DSpace was chosen for the private Steelcase digital repository.  In 2011 the anniversary team strategized various solutions for collecting stories from people around the world, DSpace again was determined to be the best fit for online story submissions. The story collection site is split from the private repository, making it feasible to create public collections without communicating that a much broader repository exists. A multi-lingual feature was added to the story instance, allowing submitters to share their story in up to seven languages... It is the goal of the archivist to add 1,500 items to the private ‘Heritage’ instance this year, and 500 each subsequent year... Working with an Open Source platform was not a conscious decision. The feature set of the software itself was evaluated as best of breed and fit with the requirements of the project... Access on mobile platforms was not considered in the decision to use DSpace. However, the team has been pleasantly surprised at how well the Mirage theme for the DSpace XML User Interface works on mobile phones and tablets... Both repositories are intended to help Steelcase employees strengthen their knowledge of the company’s heritage. By accessing records in the each repository, employees can learn from the past as well as carry forward the human insight business initiated by the company’s founders 100 years ago.”