DSpace Overview

An open-source, open-standards solution to capture, store, index, distribute & preserve scholarly works in any digital format.

For those who want an Enterprise Class, fully-featured Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) — also known as an Electronic Repository — with comprehensive functionality and advanced options.

If electronic resource management is an important need for your organization or library; if your documents include both born-digital material and items that need to be digitized and preserved; if you need a powerful search engine paired with a genuine preservation mechanism — DSpace is the right fit.

DSpace builds a DAMS for academic, non-profit, commercial, or any type of organization. It's the most widely used DAMS in the world, with more than 1,000 installations and a growing, active user community.

Its most common use is as an open-access institutional repository — academic and research libraries running it to manage material created by their own faculty and students. Many organizations also use DSpace to host dataset, subject, or media-based repositories.

Jointly developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Company · Released under the BSD license
What it does

Features

Captures

  • Digital research material in any format
  • Directly from faculty or their designate
  • Large-scale, stable, managed long-term storage

Distributes

  • Via WWW, with necessary access control
  • Persistent identifiers
  • Exposed to web search engines
  • Alert services & email notifications

Describes

  • Descriptive, technical & rights metadata
  • Persistent identifiers

Preserves

  • Many approved digital formats

Built-in workflows

  • Submission & review pipelines out of the box

Built-in search engine

  • Fast, powerful discovery across the repository

Tools & plugins

  • Batch import/export & batch metadata editing
  • Curation & object backup / restoration tools

OAI-PMH / SWORD / WebDAV

  • Complies with standard protocols for access, ingest & export

Security

  • Comes with a built-in authorization stack
  • Connects with LDAP or similar existing protocols
  • Item-level granular permissions, or global permissions by community & collection

Metadata

  • Qualified Dublin Core as the default scheme
  • Accepts custom metadata schemas
  • Translates from other schemas such as MARC/MODS
Why choose it

Reasons for using DSpace

  • PROLargest community of users and developers worldwide
  • PROFree, open-source software
  • PROCompletely customizable to fit your needs
  • PROUsed by educational, government, private and commercial institutions
  • PROManages and preserves all types of digital content — text, images, moving images, MPEGs, datasets
  • PROEasily installed "out of the box"
In practice

Universities, museums, research labs, government agencies, and commercial institutions all use DSpace to build their own digital libraries — sharing their artifacts, documents, collections, and research with the world.