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What is DSpace - why use DSpace? - not mktg piece, help audience understand what DSpace does

  • what DSpace does really well and not so well
  • why would you chose DSpace vs. Fedora (same content as in Fedora version)

Assumptions to proceed this page

        

Chapter 1: What is DSpace?

This chapter is designed to further your knowledge of:

  • what DSpace is
  • what it can be used for
  • it's benefits 

What is DSpace?

DSpace is an open source repository application that allows you to capture, store, index, preserve and distribute your digital material including text, video, audio and data.  DSpace provides a way to manage your materials and publications in a professionally maintained repository to give them greater visibility and accessibility over time.

There are over 1000 digital repositories worldwide using the DSpace application for a variety of digital archiving needs.  DSpace is most often used as an institutional repository- a platform that provides access to research output, scholarly publications, library collections, and more.

It has three main roles:

  • Facilitates the capture and ingest of materials, including metadata about the materials
  • Facilitates easy access to the materials, both by listing and searching
  • Facilitates the long-term preservation of the materials

The DSpace application has many customizable features and tools for managing digital content, enabling digital preservation and providing accessibility to your materials. As an open source application, there is a very active community of developers, researchers and users worldwide that contribute their expertise to enhance the DSpace application.

What can DSpace be used for?

DSpace can be used to store any type of digital materials, including:
  • Documents, such as articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers
  • Books
  • Theses
  • Data sets
  • Computer programs
  • Visualizations, simulations, and other models
  • Multimedia publications
  • Administrative records
  • Published books
  • Overlay journals
  • Bibliographic datasets
  • Images
  • Audio files
  • Video files
  • e-formatted digital library collections
  • Learning objects
  • Web pages

What are the benefits of using DSpace?

Because DSpace is a turnkey repository application it may be deployed "out-of-the-box" as an institutional repository. The majority of DSpace users do little to no customization of the application beyond adding local branding.  DSpace allows you to:

  • 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

What does DSpace look like?

  • No labels

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