DSpace overview
DSpace is a digital repository - software that supports the management of an organisation's digital assets.
It supports a wide variety of digital content, such as digitised books, articles, documents, graphics, photographs, audio, video or sets of experimental data. It is typically used as an institutional repository by organisations that create or hold a large number of digital assets such as universities, laboratories, libraries and archives.
An item of digital content in DSpace parlance is called a "bitstream". Reflecting its origins among research institutions, bitstreams and their associated metadata are assigned to "collections" in the repository, and collections are owned by "communities". The content is indexed by DSpace so that it can be searched for, retrieved and displayed over the web.
DSpace is also intended as a platform for digital preservation activities. It supports long-term persistent identifiers for content that never change or break and the development roadmap forsees features to manage the technological obsolecence of data formats over time
DSpace is an open source under the BSD licence so there is no lock-in to a particular service provider. The DSpace community is well established, active and backed by significant institutions..
In addtition to the standard DSpace features, Prosentient have taken DSpace further to provide integration with the Koha open source Library Management System in order to provide a unified catalogue of electronic and other library resources. Other features include:
- a choice of two interface technologies: the JSP UI and the Mannakin XML UI
- the ability to organise content into structured hierarchies
- access control for different kinds of users down to the individual item level
- a strong workflow system that allows your institutional authors/collaborators to directly upload documents in a structured way
- an enhanced upload function we have developed for multi-file upload
- the ability to accept all kinds of digital file formats
- a built-in web server to make content available on the internet
- ability to describe contributions to the repository using the Dublin Core metadata scheme
- ability to extend the metadata scheme to institutional requirements
- fast, simple and advanced searches against the indexed metadata
- reports providing summary statistics from the repository
- integration with handle.net for long term persistent URL creation
- the ability to notify content owners as particular formats need updating
- supports industry protocols, such as Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, which allows automatic replication with other DSpace servers
- open source "BSD" licence means DSpace is freely available for download and in widespread use