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DSpaceDirect is a hosted version of the latest stable version of out-of-the-box DSpace software. The service is provided by the DuraSpace non-profit organization and allows institutions of all sizes to store, organize, and manage DSpace repository content in the cloud. DSpaceDirect can be used to preserve and provide access to digital objects and makes content easily searchable by end users and easily managed by content curators.

In order to make your DSpaceDirect site easier to use, we've slightly tweaked which out-of-the-box DSpace features are enabled or disabled by default. Below is a brief summary of our default settings for DSpaceDirect. As a DSpaceDirect customer, you may ask for a different set of features to be enabled or disabled based on your own needs.

Enabled by default in DSpaceDirect:
  • DSpace XMLUI (XML based UI): Each DSpaceDirect site has its own custom theme, which is based on the default "Mirage" XMLUI Theme which comes with DSpace.
  • Discovery search feature: This allows for filtered/faceted searches within DSpace.
  • Usage Statistics (Solr-based): This allows for Community/Collection/Item usage statistics to be captured. 
  • Google Analytics may be enabled and is recommended.
  • Bulk Metadata Editing is increased to 500 items at a time. This allows administrators to change the metadata of up to 500 items at once, instead of the default of 20.
  • Google Scholar friendly embedded tags: These HTML tags are hidden into each page and allow Google Scholar to more easily index/search your site.
  • RSS/Atom feeds: These feeds allow users to subscribe to your site or to individual Communities or Collections. Users can receive notifications of newly added content in their RSS reader of choice.
  • Checksum checker feature: This feature is run occasionally and verifies that individual files stored in DSpaceDirect have not become corrupted.
  • OAI-PMH interface: This allows for external systems to harvest metadata via OAI-PMH and link to content in your site.
  • SWORD (v1 and v2) interface: This allows for external systems to deposit content via the SWORD protocol (after authenticating)
  • All other standard "out-of-the-box" DSpace features (except where noted below)

Disabled by default in DSpaceDirect:
 (may be enabled by request)
  • Item Level Versioning. This feature lets you version Items within DSpace. However, as the feature is still very new to DSpace (and disabled by default), we have chosen to leave it disabled in DSpaceDirect.
  • Advanced Approval Workflows. These allow more flexibility to the workflow approval processes. However, as the feature is still very new to DSpace (and disabled by default), we have chosen to leave it disabled in DSpaceDirect.
  • Ability to assign Creative Commons licenses to Items during deposit. As this feature is disabled by default in DSpace, we have chosen to leave it disabled in DSpaceDirect.
  • LDAP or Shibboleth Authentication. By default, DSpaceDirect just uses DSpace's internal authentication. However, if your institution uses LDAP or Shibboleth we will gladly help configure DSpaceDirect to use it as well.
  • SWORD Client. This feature allows admins to send content from DSpace to an external system which supports the SWORD protocol.

Please note that the above list will change over time as new features are added to DSpace.  For DSpaceDirect, our general policy is to ensure default DSpace features are always enabled. We also try to enable optional DSpace features which we feel are both widely useful and well established/stable.

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Custom Code

DSpaceDirect customers are not be able to make direct changes to the code of their DSpace site (though customers may request theme changes or similar). The DuraSpace organization handles the installation, maintenance, and upgrades of the DSpace code and the servers it is running on as part of the hosted and managed DSpaceDirect service.


Allowing customers to add customized code may complicate the upgrade process for their site, making it potentially very difficult for DuraSpace to perform an upgrade on your behalf. Further, allowing customers to have direct server access (e.g. via SSH) can also be a security concern as DuraSpace runs several customer sites on a single server. For those reasons, DuraSpace does not give customers direct access to update or modify the DSpace code for their site.


API

Currently, DSpaceDirect offers the following (out-of-the-box) DSpace APIs:

Full Text Search (I.E. Search Within Documents)

DSpaceDirect does provide full text search but only for specific document formats (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, HTML, plaintext).  Note that image-based PDFs (e.g. PDFs generated from scanning physical documents) cannot be full text searched unless they are OCRed before being deposited into DSpace.

Please note that documents are indexed in an overnight process (as this activity can take some time, depending on the quantity and size of documents). This means that you will not be able to search within the full text of documents until the next day (however, document metadata is searchable immediately). There are also (usually rare) occasions where DSpace is unable to index a supported document for full text searching. If you notice that a particular document is not searchable after a day passes, please do let us know.

Representing Journals in DSpaceDirect

In the DSpace structure, often the Journal is represented as a Community (or sub-community) with the issue represented as a Collection, and individual articles as Items within the collection. This arrangement may or may not be ideal depending on how your institution may want a Journal displayed/represented, but DSpace does still allow for basic Journal/Issue metadata (and thumbnails) as Communities/Collections support metadata and thumbnails.

Multimedia (images, video, audio)

Currently, there are no integrated media viewers (for video or audio files) in DSpaceDirect, although you are able to *store* any media file format. For images, you are also able to store any image format with DSpaceDirect, and certain image formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG) will automatically have a thumbnail generated to be used within the user interface. However, there are not slideshow or image gallery capabilities.


CAS Support

DSpaceDirect does not support CAS currently. However, there was some development work being conducted in order to support CAS in the latest release of open source DSpace. The work will likely be rolled into next year's release of DSpace which at that time, would then be made available in DSpaceDirect. 

Metadata 

Dublin Core

Yes, DSpaceDirect metadata is all in Dublin Core as this is what the DSpace software uses to store metadata internally.

Metadata Export

Through the DSpaceDirect administrative interface, you can export metadata to an Excel spreadhseet or CSV file.

Usage Statistics

Built-in usage statistics (Solr-based) are included in DSpaceDirect. Community/Collection/Item statistics are captured. By default only admins can see the built-in statistics. It is possible to make very basic statistics publicly available, but only information about downloads and views are displayed per item/collection/community. 

Google Analytics may also be enabled and is recommended. Google Analytics more thoroughly weeds out spider and bot activity, resulting in more accurate statistics.