DSpace is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

repository software package typically used for creating

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

repositories for scholarly and/or published digital content. While DSpace shares some feature overlap with

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

s and

document management systems A document management system (DMS) is usually a computerized system used to store, share, track and manage files or documents. Some systems include history tracking where a log of the various versions created and modified by different users is r ...

, the DSpace repository software serves a specific need as a digital archives system, focused on the long-term storage, access and preservation of digital content. The optional DSpace registry lists more than three thousand repositories all over the world.

History

The first public version of DSpace was released in November 2002, as a joint effort between developers from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

and

HP Labs HP Labs is the exploratory and advanced research group for HP Inc. HP Labs' headquarters is in Palo Alto, California and the group has research and development facilities in Bristol, UK. The development of programmable desktop calculators, ink ...

. Following the first user group meeting in March 2004, a group of interested institutions formed the DSpace Federation, which determined the governance of future software development by adopting the Apache Foundation's community development model as well as establishing the DSpace Committer Group. In July 2007 as the DSpace user community grew larger, HP and MIT jointly formed the DSpace Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that provided leadership and support. In May 2009 collaboration on related projects and growing synergies between the DSpace Foundation and the Fedora Commons organization led to the joining of the two organizations to pursue their common mission in a not-for-profit called DuraSpace. DuraSpace and LYRASIS merged in July 2019. Currently the DSpace software and user community receives leadership and guidance from LYRASIS.

Technology

DSpace is constructed with

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

web applications A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

, many programs, and an associated

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

store. The web applications provide interfaces for administration, deposit, ingest, search, and access. The asset store is maintained on a file system or similar storage system. The metadata, including access and configuration information, is stored in a

relational database A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

and supports the use of

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

and

Oracle database Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for ru ...

. DSpace holdings are made available primarily via a

web interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

. More recent versions of DSpace also support

faceted search Faceted search augments lexical search with a faceted navigation system, allowing users to narrow results by applying filters based on a faceted classification of the items. It is a parametric search technique. A faceted classification system clas ...

and browse functionality using Apache Solr.

Features

Some most important features of DSpace are as follows. * Free

software * Completely customizable to fit user needs * Manage and preserve all format of digital content (

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

, Word,

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC that sets standards for media coding, includ ...

TIFF Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

files) * Apache SOLR based search for

and full text contents *

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

Support * Interface available in 22 languages * Granular group based access control, allowing setting permissions down to the level of individual files * Optimized for

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

indexing * Integration with BASE, CORE,

OpenAIRE The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europe ...

Unpaywall OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization that creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data (to the extent allowed b ...

and

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

Operating systems

DSpace software runs on Linux, Solaris, Unix, Ubuntu and Windows. It can also be installed o
OS X
Linux is by far the most common OS for DSpace.

Notable DSpace repositories

* The World Bank -

Open Knowledge Repository The Open Knowledge Repository is the official open-access repository of the World Bank and features research content about development. It was launched in 2012, alongside the World Bank's Open Access Policy and its adoption of the Creative Commons ...

* Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository * Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard * DSpace@MIT *Spiral - Imperial College London Repository * WHO Institutional Repository for Information Sharing A full list of institutional repositories using DSpace software as well as others is available via the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and at the DSpace Registry.

References

External links

* – official site {{DEFAULTSORT:Dspace 2002 software Digital library software Free institutional repository software Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Massachusetts Institute of Technology software Open-access archives Software using the BSD license Free and open-source software