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The Discovery Module for the XML user interface enables faceted searching & browsing for your repository.

Although these techniques are new in DSpace, they might feel familiar from other platforms like Aquabroser or Amazon, where facets help you to select the right product according to facets like price and brand. DSpace Discovery offers very powerful browse and search configurations that were only possible with code customization in the past.

Watch the DSpace Discovery introduction video

What is a Sidebar Facet

From the user perspective, faceted search (also called faceted navigation, guided navigation, or parametric search) breaks up search results into multiple categories, typically showing counts for each, and allows the user to "drill down" or further restrict their search results based on those facets.

When you have successfully enabled Discovery in your DSpace, you will notice that the different enabled facets are visualized in a "Discover" section in your sidebar, by default, right below the Browse options.
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In this example, there are 3 Sidebar Facets, Author, Subject and Date Issued. It's important to know that multiple metadata fields can be included in one facet. For example, the Author facet above includes values from both dc.contributor.author as well as dc.creator.

Another important property of Sidebar Facets is that their contents are automatically updated to the context of the page. On collection homepages or community homepages it will include information about the items included in that particular collection or community.

What is a Search Filter

In a standard search operation, a user specifies his complete query prior to launching the operation. If the results are not satisfactory, the user starts over again with a (slightly) altered query.

In a faceted search, a user can modify the list of displayed search results by specifying additional "filters" that will be applied on the list of search results. In DSpace, a filter is a contain condition applied to specific facets. In the example below, a user started with the search term "approach", which yielded 15 results. By applying the filter "economics" on the facet "Subject". After applying this filter, only 6 results remain.

Another example would be the standard search operation \[*

In a faceted search, a user can filter what they are looking for by grouping entries into a facet, and drill down to find the content they are interested in.
So instead of user searching: \[ wetland + "dc.author=Mitsch, William J" + dc.subject="water quality"* \]. With filtered search, usersa user can insteadstart doby their initial search,searching for \[ *wetland* \], and then filter the results by attributes.

Although these techniques are new in DSpace, they might feel familiar from other platforms like Aquabroser or Amazon, where facets help you to select the right product according to facets like price and brand. DSpace Discovery offers very powerful browse and search configurations that were only possible with code customization in the past.

Watch the DSpace Discovery introduction video

 by the other attributes, author and subject.

Discovery Features

• Configurable sidebar browse facets that can display contents from any metadata field
  • Dynamically generated timespans for dates
• Customizable recent submissions display on the repository homepage, collection and community pages
• Auto-complete on search terms

DSpace 1.8 Improvements

• Configuration moved from dspace.cfg into config/modules/discovery.cfg and config/spring/discovery/spring-dspace-addon-discovery-configuration-services.xml
• Individual communities and collections can have their own Discovery configuration.

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In addition to the summarized descriptions of the default values, following details help you to better understand these defaults. If you haven't yet, download the configuration file and review it together with the following details|pages/viewpageattachments.action?pageId=25470754&highlight=spring-dspace-addon-discovery-configuration-services.xml#Discovery-attachment-spring-dspace-addon-discovery-configuration-services.xml\.
The file contains one default configuration that defines following sidebar facets, search filters, sort fields and recent submissions display:

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