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OpenURL Support

DSpace supports the OpenURL protocol from SFX, in a rather simple fashion. If your institution has an SFX server, DSpace will display an OpenURL link on every item page, automatically using the Dublin Core metadata. Additionally, DSpace can respond to incoming OpenURLs. Presently it simply passes the information in the OpenURL to the search subsystem. A list of results is then displayed, which usually gives the relevant item (if it is in DSpace) at the top of the list.

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• Descriptive Metadata: DSpace can support multiple flat metadata schemas for describing an item. A qualified Dublin Core metadata schema loosely based on the Library Application Profile set of elements and qualifiers is provided by default. The set of elements and qualifiers used by MIT Libraries comes pre-configured with the DSpace source codeThis default schema is described in more detail in Metadata and Bitstream Format Registries. However, you can configure multiple schemas and select metadata fields from a mix of configured schemas to describe your items. Other descriptive metadata about items (e.g. metadata described in a hierarchical schema) may be held in serialized bitstreams. Communities and collections have some simple descriptive metadata (a name, and some descriptive prose), held in the DBMS.
• Administrative Metadata: This includes preservation metadata, provenance and authorization policy data. Most of this is held within DSpace's relational DBMS schema. Provenance metadata (prose) is stored in Dublin Core records. Additionally, some other administrative metadata (for example, bitstream byte sizes and MIME types) is replicated in Dublin Core records so that it is easily accessible outside of DSpace.
• Structural Metadata: This includes information about how to present an item, or bitstreams within an item, to an end-user, and the relationships between constituent parts of the item. As an example, consider a thesis consisting of a number of TIFF images, each depicting a single page of the thesis. Structural metadata would include the fact that each image is a single page, and the ordering of the TIFF images/pages. Structural metadata in DSpace is currently fairly basic; within an item, bitstreams can be arranged into separate bundles as described above. A bundle may also optionally have a primary bitstream. This is currently used by the HTML support to indicate which bitstream in the bundle is the first HTML file to send to a browser. In addition to some basic technical metadata, a bitstream also has a 'sequence ID' that uniquely identifies it within an item. This is used to produce a 'persistent' bitstream identifier for each bitstream. Additional structural metadata can be stored in serialized bitstreams, but DSpace does not currently understand this natively.

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