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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.

By default, DSpace only recognizes specific file types, as defined in its Bitstream Format Registry.  The default Bitstream Format Registry recognizes many common file formats, but it can be enhanced at your local institution via the Admin User Interface.

Optimized for Google Indexing

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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 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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The DSpace developer community aims to rely on modern web standards and well tested libraries where possible. As a rule of thumb, users can expect that the DSpace web interfaces work on modern web browsers. DSpace developers routinely test new interface developments on recent versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Because of fast moving, automatic, incremental updates to these browsers, support is no longer targeted at specific versions of these browsers. For Internet Explorer, the The community attempts to support the latest official version and up to 2 older versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. 

In some cases, modern interfaces are developed alongside older interfaces that no longer receive active maintenance or improvements. This is particularly true for the original themes for the XML User Interface such as "Kubrick", "Classic" and "Reference". These themes still reside in the code base but are not optimized for modern browsers.

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• Descriptive Metadata: DSpace can support multiple flat metadata schemas for describing an item. A qualified Dublin Core metadata schema loosely based on the Library Application Profile set of elements and qualifiers is provided by default. The set of elements and qualifiers used by MIT Libraries comes pre-configured with the DSpace source codeThis default schema is described in more detail in Metadata and Bitstream Format Registries. However, you can configure multiple schemas and select metadata fields from a mix of configured schemas to describe your items. Other descriptive metadata about items (e.g. metadata described in a hierarchical schema) may be held in serialized bitstreams. Communities and collections have some simple descriptive metadata (a name, and some descriptive prose), held in the DBMS.
• Administrative Metadata: This includes preservation metadata, provenance and authorization policy data. Most of this is held within DSpace's relational DBMS schema. Provenance metadata (prose) is stored in Dublin Core records. Additionally, some other administrative metadata (for example, bitstream byte sizes and MIME types) is replicated in Dublin Core records so that it is easily accessible outside of DSpace.
• Structural Metadata: This includes information about how to present an item, or bitstreams within an item, to an end-user, and the relationships between constituent parts of the item. As an example, consider a thesis consisting of a number of TIFF images, each depicting a single page of the thesis. Structural metadata would include the fact that each image is a single page, and the ordering of the TIFF images/pages. Structural metadata in DSpace is currently fairly basic; within an item, bitstreams can be arranged into separate bundles as described above. A bundle may also optionally have a primary bitstream. This is currently used by the HTML support to indicate which bitstream in the bundle is the first HTML file to send to a browser. In addition to some basic technical metadata, a bitstream also has a 'sequence ID' that uniquely identifies it within an item. This is used to produce a 'persistent' bitstream identifier for each bitstream. Additional structural metadata can be stored in serialized bitstreams, but DSpace does not currently understand this natively.

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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 license selection is controlled by a site-wide configuration option, and since license selection involves 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 select to don't assign a Creative Commons licensinglicense at all. If a selection is made, metadata and (optionally) a copy of the license text in the RDF format 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. The RDF license is embedded in the html page of the item to allow machine understanding of the licensing terms. For specifics of how to configure and use Creative Commons licenses, see the configuration section.

Persistent URLs and Identifiers 

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