DSpace System Documentation: Functional Overview

The following sections describe the various functional aspects of the DSpace system.

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DSpace's OAI service does support the exposing of deletion information for withdrawn items, but not for items that are 'expunged' (see above). DSpace also supports OAI-PMH resumption tokens.

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SWORD Support

SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) is a protocol that allows the remote deposit of items into repositories. SWORD was further developed in SWORD version 2 to add the ability to retrieve, update, or delete deposits. DSpace supports the SWORD protocol via the 'sword' web application and SWord v2 via the swordv2 web application. The specification and further information can be found at http://swordapp.org.

OpenURL Support

DSpace supports the OpenURL protocol from SFX, in a rather simple fashion. If your institution has an SFX server, DSpace will display an OpenURL link on every item page, automatically using the Dublin Core metadata. Additionally, DSpace can respond DSpace supports the OpenURL protocol from SFX, in a rather simple fashion. If your institution has an SFX server, DSpace will display an OpenURL link on every item page, automatically using the Dublin Core metadata. Additionally, DSpace can respond to incoming OpenURLs. Presently it simply passes the information in the OpenURL to the search subsystem. A list of results is then displayed, which usually gives the relevant item (if it is in DSpace) at the top of the list.

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DSpace provides support for Creative Commons licenses to be attached to items in the repository. They represent an alternative to traditional copyright. To learn more about Creative Commons, visit their website. Support for the licenses license selection is controlled by a site-wide configuration option, and since license selection involves redirection to interaction with the Creative Commons website, additional parameters may be configured to work with a proxy server. If the option is enabled, users may select a Creative Commons license during the submission process, or elect to skip Creative Commons licensing. If a selection is made, metadata and (optionally) a copy of the license text and RDF metadata is stored along with the item in the repository. There is also an indication - text and a Creative Commons icon - in the item display page of the web user interface when an item is licensed under Creative Commons. For specifics of how to configure and use Creative Commons licenses, see the configuration section.

Subscriptions

As noted above, end-users (e-people) may 'subscribe' to collections in order to be alerted when new items appear in those collections. Each day, end-users who are subscribed to one or more collections will receive an e-mail giving brief details of all new items that appeared in any of those collections the previous day. If no new items appeared in any of the subscribed collections, no e-mail is sent. Users can unsubscribe themselves at any time. RSS feeds of new items are also available for collections and communities.

Import and Export

DSpace also includes batch tools to import and export items in a simple directory structure, where the Dublin Core metadata is stored in an XML file. This may be used as the basis for moving content between DSpace and other systems. For more information see Item Importer and Exporter.

There is also a METS-based export tool, which exports items as METS-based metadata with associated bitstreams referenced from the METS fileDSpace also includes various package importer and exporter tools, which support many common content packaging formats like METS. For more information see Package Importer and Exporter.

Registration

Registration is an alternate means of incorporating items, their metadata, and their bitstreams into DSpace by taking advantage of the bitstreams already being in accessible computer storage. An example might be that there is a repository for existing digital assets. Rather than using the normal interactive ingest process or the batch import to furnish DSpace the metadata and to upload bitstreams, registration provides DSpace the metadata and the location of the bitstreams. DSpace uses a variation of the import tool to accomplish registration.

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