FAQ

Do you have a question about how DSpace works? Want to learn more about Open Source software and how you can contribute to DSpace? Here are answers to the most common questions about DSpace.

If you’ve searched the FAQ and haven’t found the answer to your DSpace question, you can post a query to the DSpace-General or DSpace-Tech mailing lists.

General

What is DSpace?

A groundbreaking digital repository system, DSpace captures, stores, indexes, preserves and redistributes an organization's research material in digital formats.

Research institutions worldwide use DSpace for a variety of digital archiving needs -- from institutional repositories (IRs) to learning object repositories or electronic records management, and more.

DSpace is freely available as open source software you can customize and extend.

An active community of developers, researchers and users worldwide contribute their expertise to the DSpace Community.

Who can join the DSpace Community?

Anyone who uses DSpace can get involved, in a number of different ways:

Programming
Defining feature requirements
Writing documentation
Testing new features
Sharing your design or marketing expertise

Get involved by joining the DSpace mailing lists, adding your projects, experiences, and comments to the DSpace Wiki, and collaborating with other DSpace community members.

What are DSpace Communities and Collections?

Each DSpace service is comprised of Communities – groups that contribute content to DSpace – and Communities in turn each have Collections, which contain the content items, or files

In a university environment, for example, Communities might be departments, labs, research centers, schools, or some other administrative unit within an institution. Communities determine their own content guidelines and decide who has access to the community’s contributions. An administrator on the DSpace team, usually the DSpace User Support Manager, works with the head of a community to set up workflows for content to be approved, edited, tagged with metadata, etc.

Collections belong to a community or multiple communities (for example, research collaborations between two communities may result in a shared collection) and house the individual content items and files.

What is a DSpace Early Adopter?

In a DSpace Early Adopter program, you run a trial period for your DSpace service with a few hand-picked communities before launching a full DSpace service.

While it’s not essential to run an early adopter program, it can be enormously helpful in gathering feedback, working out the kinks, and building support for DSpace at your institution.

Who built DSpace?

The MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP) jointly developed DSpace. The system is now freely available to research institutions world-wide as an open source system that can be customized and extended.

How is DSpace different from other digital repositories?

DSpace is the first digital repository to address the myriad issues inherent in a multi-disciplinary archive, including:

Differing policies, practices and cultures established by individual disciplines
The variety of digital formats produced in today’s multi-media research environments
The complexity of metadata standards needed to accommodate and maintain access to the digital formats supported by the system

DSpace is designed with a flexible storage and retrieval architecture adaptable to a multitude of data formats and distinct research disciplines, known as “communities.” Each community has its own customized user portal that can use the community’s own practices and terminology.

Open Source

Is DSpace free?

Yes. The DSpace system is freely available as open-source software (see locations below), under the terms of the BSD distribution license.

We have also tried to find good open-source tools to package with the DSpace application, all freely available under an open-source license (although not all the same license as the one for DSpace itself), so that you get a complete system along with the part that we created.

Who can download the software?

Open-source systems like DSpace are available for anyone to download and run at any type of institution, organization, or company (or even just an individual). Users are also allowed to modify DSpace to meet an organization’s specific needs. The BSD distribution license describes the specific terms of use.

Where can I download the DSpace open-source software?

DSpace is freely available as open-source software from SourceForge.

Can I change the DSpace system?

Yes, you can customize and extend the system to suit your organization's needs. DSpace was designed to make adapting it for individual organizations as easy as possible. See the section on how to contribute at the DSpace Wiki for information on submitting code changes to DSpace.

Each application is different, but most organizations need to customize the authentication system, for example, to work with existing systems. Some organizations may want to substitute the open-source tools supplied with DSpace with different ones (for example, replacing postgreSQL with mySQL or Oracle).

Where can I learn more about Open Source?

O’Reilly & Associates has a very helpful web site devoted to open source: http://opensource.oreilly.com/.

Functionality

What kind of content does DSpace support?

DSpace accepts all manner of digital formats. Some examples of items that DSpace can accommodate are:

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
Reformatted digital library collections
Learning objects
Web pages

Can I export my digital material out of DSpace?

Yes. Currently DSpace supports exporting digital content, along with its metadata, in a simple XML-encoded file format. The DSpace developers are working on migrating this export capability to use the METS standard, but are waiting for some necessary extension schemas to emerge (such as one for qualified Dublin Core metadata, and one for minimal technical/preservation metadata for arbitrary digital objects).

Will DSpace interoperate with other systems running at my organization?

Yes, DSpace has documented Java APIs you can customize to allow interoperation with other systems an institution might be running (for example, a department’s web document system auto-depositing in DSpace, or a campus data warehouse).

What sort of persistent identifiers does DSpace use?

DSpace uses the Handle System from CNRI to assign and resolve persistent identifiers for each digital item. Handles are URN-compliant identifiers. The Handle resolver is an open-source system used in conjunction with DSpace.

The developers chose to use handles instead of persistent URLs to support citations to items in DSpace over very long time spans – longer than we believe the HTTP protocol will last. Handles in DSpace are currently implemented as URLs, but can also be modified to work with future protocols.

How does DSpace preserve digital material?

DSpace identifies two levels of digital preservation: bit preservation, and functional preservation.

Bit preservation ensures that a file remains exactly the same over time - not a single bit is changed - while the physical media evolve around it.
Functional preservation goes further: the file does change over time so that the material continues to be immediately usable in the same way it was originally while the digital formats (and physical media) evolve over time.

Some file formats can be functionally preserved using straightforward format migration, such as TIFF images or XML documents. Other formats are proprietary, or for other reasons are much harder to preserve functionally.

No one can predict the formats all users will choose for their research material. They use the best tools for their purposes, and research institutions will get whatever formats those tools produce. For this reason, there are three levels of preservation for a given format: supported, known, or unsupported.

Supported formats will be functionally preserved using either format migration or emulation techniques. Examples include TIFF, SGML, XML, AIFF, and PDF.
Known formats are those that we can’t promise to preserve, such as proprietary or binary formats, but which are so popular that third party migration tools will likely emerge to help with format migration. Examples include Microsoft Word and Powerpoint, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPerfect.
Unsupported formats are those that we don’t know enough about to do any sort of functional preservation. This would include some proprietary formats or a one-of-a-kind software program.

For all three levels, DSpace does bit-level preservation so that “digital archaeologists” of the future will have the raw material to work with if the material proves to be worth that effort.

Technical

Where can I find DSpace technical documentation?

You can find DSpace system documentation on the SourceForge project web site or on the DSpace Technology page.

I’ve installed DSpace and I have questions/problems/comments. What should I do?

The DSpace Community of developers support one another and exchange ideas and solutions on the DSpace mailing lists. Before you post a question or problem, check to see if your question has been answered already. Start by searching the DSpace mailing list archives. Then read the FAQ and check the technical documentation. If you still haven't found an answer or solution, post your questions to DSpace-tech, where members of the DSpace community will offer their assistance.

I've found a bug in the software. How do I report it?

You can report bugs and suggest enhancements through the SourceForge system. Bugs will be fixed as soon as possible, within the limits of the DSpace team’s technical support resources. The team considers all enhancements, and if an enhancement is accepted, adds it to the enhancement list for development as time and resources allow.

Of course, any users working with the open-source code are welcome to fix a bug or make an improvement to the system. See our DSpace Community Development Guidelines to learn how.

Who supports DSpace?

DSpace has a very active community of developers to contribute expertise and support through the DSpace listserv at SourceForge, DSpace-Tech.

To work with the DSpace system you’ll need local technical resources (hardware, technical experts, and so on) to really take advantage of the system. The DSpace web site offers technical documentation, and you can join the DSpace listserv, DSpace-Tech, to ask questions or post solutions.

What sort of hardware does DSpace require? What about sizing the server? How much disk space do I need?

There are no specific server requirements for DSpace except UNIX. (Because the application is written in Java, in theory it will run on other platforms as well.)

DSpace is built on top of free, open-source tools, such as the Apache Web server, the Tomcat Servlet engine, and the postgreSQL relational database system. For your convenience, we package the necessary JDBC and other drivers and libraries together with DSpace. This set of tools should run on any UNIX-type OS, such as Linux, HP/UX, or Solaris, and you can substitute other libraries if you need to run on another platform.

The system runs on anything from a laptop to a $500K server, but there are a few general recommendations for hardware architectures. For a research university, DSpace requires a reasonably good server (see below) and a decent amount of memory and disk storage.

Some examples (not necessarily endorsements):

HP Server rx2600, powered by dual 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processors (900MHz), 2GB RAM, 26 GB internal disk storage. HP StorageWorks Modular SAN Array 1000 (msa1000) with a single high-performance controller. Options include a second controller and, with the addition of two more drive enclosures, controls up to 42 Ultra2, Ultra 3, or Ultra320 SCSI drives. Total capacity can be six terabytes. Cost starts around $40K and goes up to around $1.8M.

More hardware suggestions from HP can be found at http://dspace.org/what/dspace-hp-hw.html.
SunFire 280R Server, two 900MHz UltraSPARC-III Cu processors, 8MB E-cache, 2GB memory, two 36GB 10,000rpm HH internal FCAL disk drives, DVD, 436-GB, or 12 x 26.4 Gbyte 10K RPM disks, Sun StorEdge A1000 rackmountable w/ 1 HW RAID controller, 24MB std cache. Around $30K.
Dell PowerEdge 2650 with dual Xeon processors (2.4GHz), 2GB RAM, 2x73GB scsi disks. One 2.5TB Apple XServe. A DLT tape library to back up the DB/jsps etc. Around $10K.

Of course, your mileage (and costs) will vary depending on what you plan to do with the system.

Metadata

What is Metadata?

Metadata is literally “data about data.” It is descriptive information used for querying. Some metadata can be done mechanically, such as file sizes, checksums, and full-text indexing, for instance. Other metadata is a higher order of human-made description such as titles, authors, unique identifiers, and abstracts.

DSpace uses a qualified version of Dublin Core metadata across all content. Some communities or collections may also have tailored metadata available (such as MARC records for book collections, or FGDC records for geographic datasets). But even where that's available for some items, we crosswalk more detailed metadata records into our Dublin Core vocabulary to ensure a common layer of descriptive specificity for browsing and searching across everything.

What metadata standards does DSpace support? Can I create metadata using the [SCORM or VRA or FGDC or MARC or myOwnSchema]?

In this context support for a given metadata schema means that metadata can be entered into DSpace, stored in the database, indexed appropriately, and made searchable through the public user interface. This currently applies mainly to descriptive metadata, although as standards emerge it could also include technical, rights, preservation, structural, and behavioral metadata.

Currently DSpace supports only the Dublin Core metadata element set with a few qualifications conforming to the library application profile (see DSpace Metadata). The DSpace team hopes to support a subset of the IMS/SCORM element set (for describing education material) in the coming year.

HP and MIT also have a research project called SIMILE that is investigating how to support arbitrary metadata schemas using RDF as applied by the Haystack research project in the Lab for Computer Science and some of the Semantic Web technologies being developed by the W3C.

Does DSpace support OAI?

DSpace supports the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) v2.0 as a data provider. OAI support was implemented using OCLC’s OAICat open-source software to make DSpace item records available for harvesting. DSpace@MIT is registered as a data provider with the Open Archives Initiative. Other institutions running DSpace may choose to turn on OAI or not, and to register as a data provider or not.

The DSpace Federation

What is the DSpace Federation and can I (or must I) join it?

The DSpace Federation coordinates the planning, research, development, and distribution of DSpace, an open source digital repository system. The DSpace Federation also advocates for digital archiving initiatives open access to research literature.

At this time, there is no formal membership structure, just the collective participation of institutions using DSpace, who often face the same set of challenges. Currently participating in the DSpace Federation are research institutions, libraries, archives, cultural heritage institutions, government agencies, and corporations.

We actively encourage other institutions to use DSpace. If your organization is running a production DSpace system, please add your URL to the DSpace Wiki.

Note that the DSpace name is trademarked by MIT to prevent any commercialization of the system using that name, but institutions running DSpace are free to rename the system on their user interface.

What is the DSpace Federation Project?

The DSpace Federation includes all the research institutions that are using the DSpace digital repository system. From 2003-2004, a group of research institutions participated in the DSpace Federation Project to study the adaptability of DSpace to organizations with varied needs.

Funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Cambridge-MIT Institute, this one-year study began the process of building a collaborative federation of institutions running DSpace. See the DSpace Federation Project page for details and the project report.

For More Information

If you’ve searched the FAQ and haven’t found the answer to your DSpace question, post a query to the DSpace-General or DSpace-Tech mailing lists.

HP-MIT Alliance: vision, collaboration, invention