Metadata Recommendations

Recommended Metadata Fields

DSpace provides a broad list of metadata fields out of the box (see: Metadata and Bitstream Format Registries), and a variety of options for adding content to DSpace (both from the UI and from other services). No matter which Ingest option you use, DSpace recommends ensuring that the following metadata fields are specified:

• Title (dc.title)
  • When submitting an Item via the DSpace web user interface, this field is required.
  • If you add an Item to DSpace through another means (SWORD, etc), it is recommend to specify a title for an Item. Without a title, the Item will show up in DSpace a "Untitled".

• Publication Date (dc.date.issued)

• When submitting an Item via the DSpace web user interface, this field is required (by default).

  • However, your System Administrator can choose to enable the "Initial Questions" step within the Submission User Interface.  Enabling this step will cause the following to occur: If the item is said to be "published", then the Publication Date will be required. If the item is said to be "unpublished" then the Publication Date will be auto-set to today's date (date of submission).  WARNING: Google Scholar has recommended against automatically assigning this "dc.date.issued" field to the date of submission as it often results in incorrect dates in Google Scholar results.  See DS-1481 and DS-1745 for more details.

• If you add and Item to DSpace through another means (SWORD, etc), it is recommended to specify the date in which an Item was published, in ISO-8601 (e.g. 2007, 2008-01, or 2011-03-04). This ensures DSpace can accurately report the publication date to services like Google Scholar. If an item is unpublished, you can either chose to leave this blank, or pass in the literal string "today" (which will tell DSpace to automatically set it to the date of ingest)

  DSpace will not auto-assign a "dc.date.issued"

  As of DSpace 4.0, the system will not assign a "dc.date.issued" when unspecified. Previous versions of DSpace (3.0 or below) would set "dc.date.issued" to the date of accession (dc.date.accessioned), if it was unspecified during ingest.

  If you are adding content to DSpace without using the DSpace web user interface, there are two recommended options for assigning "dc.date.issued"

  • If the item is previously published before, please set "dc.date.issued" to the date of publication in ISO-8601(e.g. 2007, 2008-01, or 2011-03-04)
  • If the item has never been previously published, you may set "dc.date.issued='today'" (the literal string "today"). This will cause DSpace to automatically assign "dc.date.issued" to the date of accession (dc.date.accessioned), as it did previously
    • You can also chose to leave "dc.date.issued" as unspecified, but then the new Item will have an empty date within DSpace.

Obviously, we recommend specifying as much metadata as you can about a new Item. For a full list of supported metadata fields, please see: Metadata and Bitstream Format Registries

Local Fields

You may encounter situations in which you will require an appropriate place to store information that does not immediately fit with the description of a field in the default registry. The recommended practice in this situation is to create new fields in a separate schema. You can choose your own name and prefix for this schema such as local. or myuni.

It is generally discouraged to use any of the fields from the default schema as a place to store information that doesn't correspond with the fields description. This is especially true if you are ever considering the option to open up your repository metadata for external harvesting.