Building 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.

This section explains how to use an Early Adopter trial period to begin building DSpace communities, and how to encourage and train their members to contribute content to collections in DSpace.

About Communities and Collections

DSpace 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.

One person in each community should act as liaison between the community and the DSpace team. This organization structure allows the head of a community to make content policy decisions locally – where the content is created. Communities manage their own metadata and can also customize the look and feel of their pages in DSpace.

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.

Running an Early Adopter Trial Program to Test the Service

This section describes how to launch DSpace with a small group of test groups, also called Early Adopter Communities. 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.

• Launching a DSpace Early Adopter Program
• Setting up DSpace Communities