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• Organize, describe and store your content easily through the built-in structure
• Archive and distribute material you would currently put on your personal website
• Get your materials out quickly, to a worldwide audience through exposure to search engines such as Google
• Have a persistent network identifier for your work, which never changes or breaks

Additionally, DSpace allows institutional repositories to:

• Preserve reusable teaching materials that you can use with course management systems
• Store examples of students' projects (with the students' permission)
• Showcase students' theses (again with permission)
• Keep track of your own publications/bibliography

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1. Web-based interface makes it easy for a submitter to create an archival item by depositing files. DSpace was designed to handle any format from simple text documents to datasets and digital video.
2. Data files, also called bitstreams, are organized together into related sets. Each bitstream has a technical format and other technical information. This technical information is kept with bitstreams to assist with preservation over time.
3. An item is an "archival atom" consisting of grouped, related content and associated descriptions (metadata). An item's exposed metadata is indexed for browsing and searching. Items are organized into collections of logically-related material.
4. A community is the highest level of the DSpace content hierarchy. They correspond to parts of the organization such as departments, labs, research centers or schools.
5. DSpace's modular architecture allows for creation of large, multi-disciplinary repositories that ultimately can be expanded across institutional boundaries.
6. DSpace is committed to going beyond reliable file  preservation to offer functional preservation where files are kept accessible as technology formats, media, and paradigms evolve over time for as many types of files as possible.
7. The end-user interface supports browsing and searching the archives. Once an item is located, Web-native formatted files can be displayed in a Web browser while other formats can be downloaded and opened with a suitable application program.

Hungry for more?

Below is a list of some materials that can help new DSpace users get started.
Comparing/Evaluating Software Options

Repository Planning Guidance