Page History

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Another important mechanism for discovery in DSpace is the browse. This is the process whereby the user views a particular index, such as the title index, and navigates around it in search of interesting items. The browse subsystem provides a simple API for achieving this by allowing a caller to specify an index, and a subsection of that index. The browse subsystem then discloses the portion of the index of interest. Indices that may be browsed are item title, item issue date, item author, and subject terms. Additionally, the browse can be limited to items within a particular collection or community.

Optimized for Google Indexing

The Duraspace community fosters a close relation with Google to ensure optimal indexing of DSpace content, primarily in the Google Search and Google Scholar products. For the purpose of Google Scholar indexing, DSpace added specific metadata in the page head tags facilitating indexing in Scholar. More information can be retrieved on the Google Scholar Metadata Mappings page. Popular DSpace repositories often generate over 60% of their visits from Google pages.

OpenURL Support

Supported file types

DSpace can accommodate any type of uploaded file. While DSpace is most known for hosting text based materials including scholarly communication and electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), there are many stakeholders in the community who use DSpace for multimedia, data and learning objects. While some restrictions apply, DSpace can even serve as a store for HTML Archives.

Files that have been uploaded to DSpace are often referred to as "Bitstreams". The reason for this is mainly historic and tracks back to the technical implementation. After ingestion, files in DSpace are stored on the file system as a stream of bits without the file extension.

Optimized for Google Indexing

The Duraspace community fosters a close relation with Google to ensure optimal indexing of DSpace content, primarily in the Google Search and Google Scholar products. For the purpose of Google Scholar indexing, DSpace added specific metadata in the page head tags facilitating indexing in Scholar. More information can be retrieved on the Google Scholar Metadata Mappings page. Popular DSpace repositories often generate over 60% of their visits from Google pages.

OpenURL Support

DSpace 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.

Supported file types

DSpace can accommodate any type of uploaded file. While DSpace is most known for hosting text based materials including scholarly communication and electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), there are many stakeholders in the community who use DSpace for multimedia, data and learning objects.

Files that have been uploaded to DSpace are often referred to as "Bitstreams". The reason for this is mainly historic and tracks back to the technical implementation. After ingestion, fles in DSpace are stored on the file system as a stream of bits without the file extension.

Support for HTML Archives

For the most part, at present DSpace simply supports uploading and downloading of bitstreams as-is. This is fine for the majority of commonly-used file formats – for example PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, spreadsheets and so forth. HTML documents (Web sites and Web pages) are far more complicated, and this has important ramifications when it comes to digital preservation:

• Web pages tend to consist of several files – one or more HTML files that contain references to each other, and stylesheets and image files that are referenced by the HTML files.
• Web pages also link to or include content from other sites, often imperceptibly to the end-user. Thus, in a few year's time, when someone views the preserved Web site, they will probably find that many links are now broken or refer to other sites than are now out of context.In fact, it may be unclear to an end-user when they are viewing content stored in DSpace and when they are seeing content included from another site, or have navigated to a page that is not stored in DSpace. This problem can manifest when a submitter uploads some HTML content. For example, the HTML document may include an image from an external Web site, or even their local hard drive. When the submitter views the HTML in DSpace, their browser is able to use the reference in the HTML to retrieve the appropriate image, and so to the submitter, the whole HTML document appears to have been deposited correctly. However, later on, when another user tries to view that HTML, their browser might not be able to retrieve the included image since it may have been removed from the external server. Hence the HTML will seem broken.
• Often Web pages are produced dynamically by software running on the Web server, and represent the state of a changing database underneath it.
  Dealing with these issues is the topic of much active research. Currently, DSpace bites off a small, tractable chunk of this problem. DSpace can store and provide on-line browsing capability for self-contained, non-dynamic HTML documents. In practical terms, this means:

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• diagram.gif is OK
• image/foo.gif is OK
• ../index.html is only OK in a file that is at least a directory deep in the HTML document/site hierarchy
• /stylesheet.css is not OK (the link will break)
• http://somedomain.com/content.html is not OK (the link will continue to link to the external site which may change or disappear)

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, 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.

Metadata Management

Metadata

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