DSpace was developed in response to expressed faculty needs for an easy to use, dependable
service that could manage, host, preserve, and distribute faculty materials in digital formats. It
offers faculty the advantages and convenience of web based submission and dissemination. DSpace
can accommodate a variety of genres like: documents, datasets, and images and formats like: txt,
pdf, doc, and jpg. It manages and distributes digital items, made up of digital files (or “bitstreams”)
and allows for the creation, indexing, and searching of associated metadata to locate and retrieve
the items. It is also designed to support the long-term preservation of the digital material stored in
the repository.
DSpace is also well suited to housing digitized historic collections to enhance the contextual reference
for newly submitted works. For the submission of research materials in DSpace, the self-defined,
depositing Communities determines who may have access to archived works, with options ranging
from a worldwide audience to a select few. There is no charge for submitting to or viewing digital
material in DSpace.
DSpace provides a way to manage research materials and publications in a professionally maintained
repository to give users greater visibility and accessibility over time.
5.1 Top Reasons to Use DSpace
5.1.1 Largest Community Of Users And Developers Worldwide
DSpace has over 250 institutions that are currently using the DSpace software within their organization
in a production or project environment. The most common use is by research libraries as an
institutional repository, however there are many organizations using the software to manage digital
data for a project, subject repository, web archive, and dataset repository.
A census of Institutional Repositories in the United States was done by CLIR in 2007 and found that
DSpace was the preferred Institutional Repository system software of the 446 participants in the
survey.
5.1.2 Completely Customizable To Fit One’s Needs
Some of the key ways that can customize the DSpace application to suit one’s needs are as follows:
User interface -
One can fully customize the look and feel of DSpace website so it will integrate seamlessly with their
own institution’s website and can be more intuitive for their users. This is possible by using the
Manakin extension, which is now to release 1.5.
Ability To Customize the Metadata -
Dublin core is the default metadata format within the DSpace application, however one can add or