Custom Code
DSpaceDirect customers are not be able to make direct changes to the code of their DSpace site (though customers may request theme changes or similar). The DuraSpace organization handles the installation, maintenance, and upgrades of the DSpace code and the servers it is running on as part of the hosted and managed DSpaceDirect service.
Allowing customers to add customized code may complicate the upgrade process for their site, making it potentially very difficult for DuraSpace to perform an upgrade on your behalf. Further, allowing customers to have direct server access (e.g. via SSH) can also be a security concern as DuraSpace runs several customer sites on a single server. For those reasons, DuraSpace does not give customers direct access to update or modify the DSpace code for their site.
API
Currently, DSpaceDirect offers the following (out-of-the-box) DSpace APIs:
SWORD v1 or v2 (available off the "/sword" path of each site) - more info on using SWORD at http://swordapp.org/about/
OAI-PMH (available off the "/oai" path of each site) - more info on using OAI-PMH at: http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/
REST API (available off the "/rest" path of each site) - more info on the DSpace REST API at: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSDOC5x/REST+API
Full Text Search (I.E. Search Within Documents)
Please note that documents are indexed in an overnight process (as this activity can take some time, depending on the quantity and size of documents). This means that you will not be able to search within the full text of documents until the next day (however, document metadata is searchable immediately). There are also (usually rare) occasions where DSpace is unable to index a supported document for full text searching. If you notice that a particular document is not searchable after a day passes, please do let us know.
Representing Journals in DSpaceDirect
In the DSpace structure, often the Journal is represented as a Community (or sub-community) with the issue represented as a Collection, and individual articles as Items within the collection. This arrangement may or may not be ideal depending on how your institution may want a Journal displayed/represented, but DSpace does still allow for basic Journal/Issue metadata (and thumbnails) as Communities/Collections support metadata and thumbnails.
Multimedia (images, video, audio)
Currently, there are no integrated media viewers (for video or audio files) in DSpaceDirect, although you are able to *store* any media file format. For images, you are also able to store any image format with DSpaceDirect, and certain image formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG) will automatically have a thumbnail generated to be used within the user interface. However, there are not slideshow or image gallery capabilities.
CAS Support
DSpaceDirect does not support CAS currently. However, there was some development work being conducted in order to support CAS in the latest release of open source DSpace. The work will likely be rolled into next year's release of DSpace which at that time, would then be made available in DSpaceDirect.
Metadata
Dublin Core
Metadata Export
Through the DSpaceDirect administrative interface, you can export metadata to an Excel spreadhseet or CSV file.
Usage Statistics
Built-in usage statistics (Solr-based) are included in DSpaceDirect. Community/Collection/Item statistics are captured. By default only admins can see the built-in statistics. It is possible to make very basic statistics publicly available, but only information about downloads and views are displayed per item/collection/community.
Google Analytics may also be enabled and is recommended. Google Analytics more thoroughly weeds out spider and bot activity, resulting in more accurate statistics.