The community is the primary storage level in the DSpace’s storage hierarchy that holds sub-community and collections. This document provides an overview of creating, editing, and deleting a community. The documentation below assumes that the user has the relevant authorizations. For example, the admin menu and edit buttons would appear to a user having community administration permission.

If you’re unsure about community administration permissions assigned to your account for the target community, contact your system administrator.

Audience

1. Repository Administrator
2. Community Administrator

Create Community

Step 1: Login using your credentials

Step 2: Rollover your cursor on the “+” sign

Step 3: Click on the “New” link and click on “Community” to proceed with the community creation.

Step 4: A popup providing the option to either create a Parent community or a sub-community will appear, with a list showing existing communities.  Create your new community by either: 

1. Click on “Create a new top-level community” to create a top-level community.
   … or…
   
2. Typing the name of the existing parent community in the search field to add a sub-community within. Upon typing a few letters of the community’s name, a list of communities having those letters or words will appear. Click on the community name to create a sub-community.

Step 5: As per the user’s choice in the previous step, the application will open the create community or create a sub-community form to populate information regarding the community’s profile. Below is the explanation of the information that needs to be populated on this form.

It is important to understand that both “Create Community” and “Create Sub-community” forms are identical. The critical difference between both is that the “Create Community” form helps create a top-level community while the latter helps create a sub-community within a community or a sub-community.

The description provided below the following screenshot remains identical for both Community and Sub-community creation.

1. Community logo – Select the community’s logo by clicking on the ‘browse’ link to select an image file. It is advisable to maintain uniform dimensions of the logo across the repository.
2. Name – Enter the community’s name. It is marked with ‘*’ to show it is a mandatory field.
3. Introductory text (HTML) – Users can add introductory text providing an overview of the contents stored in the community. One can utilize HTML tags to format the text or continue entering plain text content.
4. Short Description – This field can have a one-liner description of the community that appears with the community name in the list of communities on the parent community page (or on the DSpace’s in the case of a top-level community.
5. Copyright text (HTML) – Users can enter copyright information here. Fields marked with (HTML) support HTML tag-based formatting.
6. News (HTML) – Enter news about this community. Users can update this by regularly going to this section via the editing community.
7. Action Buttons – Users can click on the appropriate button as determined. Clicking on the Save button will add the community to the repository.

Step 6: Click on the ‘Save’ button to complete the Community creation. A success prompt will pop up upon community creation, and the user will be re-directed to the community homepage.

Success prompt upon community creation

Community homepage