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The success of any open-source project lies with the community contributing its collective energy, knowledge, enthusiasm, and effort. DSpace is developed and supported by the user community, with the help and guidance of DuraSpace. DuraSpace is a not-for-profit organization formed in July 2009. The organizations which supported the DSpace project previously, the DSpace Foundation (2007-2009) and the DSpace Federation (2003-2004) have ceased operation. To learn more about DuraSpace, please visit www.DuraSpace.org. For technical questions about the DSpace software platform, please refer to Who provides technical support for the DSpace platform? listed below.

Open Source

Is DSpace free?

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DSpace is freely available as open-source software from SourceForge. If you are familiar with Subversion (SVN), you can also download the latest code via our Subversion Code Repository.

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 contributeat on 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 PostgreSQL with mySQL or Oracle).

Where can I learn more about Open Source?

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• 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
• eformatted e-formatted digital library collections
• Learning objects
• Web pages

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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.

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