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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

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Who supports the DSpace software platform?

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 its specific terms of use.

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.

Open Source

Is DSpace free?

Yes. The DSpace system DSpace is freely available as open-source software from SourceForge. For more information on the most recent release of the software see the Current Release Notes.

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 contributeat 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
• eformatted digital library collections
• Learning objects
• Web pages

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, Communitiesmight 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.

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).

Can I import items into DSpace in batch mode?

Yes. See overview.

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 Systemfrom 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 Technical 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, and the project wiki. 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. Because the application is written in Java, it will run on any Operating System (UNIX, Windows, Mac OSX), though most people tend to run it on UNIX. 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 from the community (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.
• 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.

How much time does it take to set up a DSpace installation?

(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 its specific terms of use.

DSpace is freely available as open-source software from SourceForge. For more information on the most recent release of the software see the Current Release Notes.

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 contributeat 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
• eformatted digital library collections
• Learning objects
• Web pages

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, Communitiesmight 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.

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).

Can I import items into DSpace in batch mode?

Yes. See overview.

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 Systemfrom 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 Technical 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, and the project wiki. 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. Because the application is written in Java, it will run on any Operating System (UNIX, Windows, Mac OSX), though most people tend to run it on UNIX. 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 from the community (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.
• 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.

How much time does it take to set up a DSpace installation?

A person familiar with installing Java and database based open source applications should be able to complete a prototype DSpace installation in a few hours to a day. After this experience, and an additional day to a week of exploring the software, a production installation should also take about a day for the basic software in a standalone configurationA person familiar with installing Java and database based open source applications should be able to complete a prototype DSpace installation in a few hours to a day. After this experience, and an additional day to a week of exploring the software, a production installation should also take about a day for the basic software in a standalone configuration. If customizations or local integrations are required (for example, for user authentication), then additional time should be allocated according to the complexity and quantity of the changes required.

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There are several good resources available. Start by reading Paul Wheatley's article "A way forward for developments in the digital preservation functions of DSpace : options, issues and recommendations".

• http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ has some good specifics about formats.

Who supports the DSpace software platform?

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for developments in the digital preservation functions of DSpace : options, issues and recommendations".

• http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ has some good specifics about formats.

For More Information

Still have questions? For general questions about DSpace and DuraSpace, you can search the DSpace-General mailing list archives or post a question to the DSpace-General mailing list.

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