A more up-to-date version of the DSpace FAQ is now available on the DSpace.org Website.

This page addresses the most commonly-asked questions about DSpace. See also the TechnicalFaq page for anwers to technical questions about DSpace.

About DSpace

What is DSpace?

A groundbreaking digital repository system, DSpace captures, stores, indexes, preserves and redistributes an organization's research material in digital formats.
Research institutions worldwide use DSpace for a variety of digital archiving needs – from institutional repositories (IRs) to learning object repositories or electronic records management, and more.

Who built DSpace?

The MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP) jointly developed DSpace. The system is now freely available to research institutions world-wide as an open source system that can be customized and extended.

Who manages DSpace?

DSpace is freely available as open source software. The DSpace Community manages the code base and releases new versions of the software. An active community of developers, researchers and users worldwide contribute their expertise to the DSpace Community.

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. See information on the most recent release of the software here.

What is the DSpace Federation?

The DSpace Federation coordinates the planning, research, development, and distribution of DSpace, an open source digital repository system. The DSpace Federation also advocates for digital archiving initiatives open access to research literature.
Members of the Federation share the following goals:

• Sharing in the development and maintenance of the DSpace source code.
• Developing a critical corpus of content that represents the intellectual output of the world's leading research institutions.
• Promoting the continued development of the DSpace service through the open source community.
• Promoting the interoperability of archival repositories.
• Ensuring the long-term preservation of scholarly work by complying with published standards and supporting national and international initiatives to develop standards in this domain.

How can my institution join the DSpace Federation?

At this time, there is no formal membership structure, just the collective participation of institutions using DSpace, who often face the same set of challenges. Currently participating in the DSpace Federation are research institutions, libraries, archives, cultural heritage institutions, government agencies, and corporations.
We actively encourage other institutions to use DSpace. If your organization is running a production DSpace system, please add your URL to the DspaceInstances page of this wiki.

Building a DSpace Service

Where can I find information on how to build a DSpace service?

For technical information see, the technical documentation and join the DSpace-Tech mailing list. For non-technical questions and concerns, see the DSpace.org web site, specifically the section on institutional repositories: Building an IR with DSpace. You'll also want to join the DSpace-General mailing list for announcements and information for DSpace teams.
Another helpful resource is the workbook, Creating an Institutional Repository, written by Mary Barton and Margaret Waters for the LEADIS seminar series in the UK, available at http://dspace.org/implement/leadirs.pdf.

Is there a list of live DSpace services?

See the list of DspaceInstances on this site. If your institution is running DSpace and isn't listed, please add your site to the list.

Is there a list of DSpace Service Providers?

Yes, see the ServiceProviders page for a list of consultants and organizations who can help you build and run your DSpace service.

Do I have to name my service "DSpace"?

No. With the release of DSpace version 1.3, it has become much easier to create a unique name for your repository. All the language in the user interface resides in one file, to make it easier to modify and translate. You just need to replace "DSpace" with the name of your respository in the file, config/language-packs/Messages.properties. Note: You must be running DSpace 1.3 or higher to use this solution.

How do I add an administrator through the admin UI?

To make someone an administrator, go into the admin interface and click 'groups'. Then click 'Edit' next to the 'Administrator' button, then click 'Select E-people', find the person you want to make an administrator, click 'Add' next to their name, then close the pop-up and click 'Update Group' on the Edit Group page.

What kinds of DSpace services are other institutions building?

Research institutions worldwide use DSpace to meet a variety of digital archiving needs:

• Institutional Repositories (IRs)
• Learning Object Repositories (LORs)
• eTheses
• Electronic Records Management (ERM)
• Digital Preservation
• Publishing
• and more

Where can I find information on Digital Preservation?

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.

DSpace Content

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 copyright do I own? What is a license? And what is a Creative Commons license?

If you have original works that you have created, including photos you have taken, you can overcome traditional copyright restrictions by selecting a 'license' that tells other folks what they are or are not allowed to do with the works. US Copyright restricts the use of materials by others unless the user hunts you down and explicitly asks you for permission to use your content. Creative Commons is a group founded by lawyers in academia (Stanford, Duke and other universities) that has defined alternative licenses whereby you retain the copyright but you attach the license to your content so people know what they can or cannot do with it. That way they don't have to go find you and ask permission each time. They still have to give you credit for the content whenever/however they use it or they violate the license agreement and are subject to legal recourse. But if a professor at another institution wants to use some of your photos or descriptive works in his/her course or a musician wants to include your photo on his/her album cover they can do so if your license says it's ok AND they give you attribution for the work (e.g. image by <your name goes here>). You select different options when you assign a creative commons license to a work and, based on the options you select, a license is generated. Here's a link to the license descriptions that can be generated based on your selections:
Meet the Licenses.
You can get to the full legal explanation through a link, but it's usually only lawyers who are interested in this . The most open license is the 'Attribution' license. With this, you receive the greatest exposure for your work since it can be distributed anywhere or modified to someone's specific needs while still giving you credit for its creation.
In DSpace, we assign the copyright license to the work at the time we submit it. There's a creative commons form built into DSpace that allows you to identify the license to be used with the item so people can know what they're allowed to do with it. Here's a link to the same form on the Creative Commons web site, with additional links that give you further explanations:
License selection.
So while you're traveling around the world, take LOTS of pictures! You, then, can make them available for others to use so people don't have to keep paying image dealers for pictures. Education will improve since these assets will be available to people who can't afford to buy these images and people will LOVE you because they'll see that you're the person who's letting them use the image. You don't lose the copyright, you don't sign it over to anyone, but you make the work available to folks within the terms you identify for the license. You can put them in your DSpace so that they're managed in appropriate collections, have metadata assigned to them, and can be found by search engines like google when people are looking for images of, say, the colosseum.

Interoperability

Can I import items into DSpace in batch mode?

Yes. See overview.

Can I export my digital material out of DSpace?

Yes. Currently DSpace can export digital content, along with its metadata in a simple XML-encoded file format or METS.

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 System from CNRI to assign and resolve persistent identifiers for each digital item. Handles are UN-compliant identifiers. The Handle resolver is an open-source system used in conjunction with DSpace.
The developers chose to use handles instead of persistent ULs 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 ULs, but can also be modified to work with future protocols.

What metadata standards does DSpace support? Can I create metadata using the SCOM/VA/FGDC/MAC or myOwnSchema?

In this context support for a given metadata schema means that metadata can be entered into DSpace, stored in the database, indexed appropriately, and made searchable through the public user interface. This currently applies mainly to descriptive metadata, although as standards emerge it could also include technical, rights, preservation, structural, and behavioral metadata.
Currently DSpace supports only the Dublin Core metadata element set with a few qualifications conforming to the library application profile (see DSpace Metadata). The DSpace team hopes to support a subset of the IMS/SCOM element set (for describing education material) in the coming year.
HP and MIT also have a research project called SIMILE, which is investigating how to support arbitrary metadata schemas using DF as applied by the Haystack research project in the Lab for Computer Science and some of the Semantic Web technologies being developed by the W3C.

Does DSpace support OAI?

DSpace supports the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) v2.0 as a data provider. OAI support was implemented using OCLC's OAICat open-source software to make DSpace item records available for harvesting. DSpace@MIT is registered as a data provider with the Open Archives Initiative. Other institutions running DSpace may choose to turn on OAI or not, and to register as a data provider or not.

Does DSpace support JSR-170?

Currently JSR-170, which is a standard Java API, isn't implemented anywhere in DSpace. We've looked at JSR-170 from two perspectives. One is where DSpace itself acts as a JSR-170 repository, and other apps can use the JSR-170 interface to store and retrieve things in DSpace. Since JSR-170 is a Java API and not (yet) a network API (or "Web Service") we haven't implemented that; the closest is probably the Lightweight Network Interface which should be appearing in DSpace 1.5, or SRW/U for search. If you want another app to interface to DSpace, these are probably the best way forward right now.

The other way we've been looking at JSR-170 is for internal use in DSpace, i.e. DSpace itself would use a storage layer with a JSR-170 interface to store things. That possibility is still on the table, though there are no immediate plans for that right now; there are some issues to do with the DSpace data model that need resolving first.

For More Information

Still have questions? For general questions about DSpace and the DSpace Federation, you can search the DSpace-General mailing list archives or post a question to the DSpace-General mailing list. Also, see DSpacenews.
For technical or software questions, see the TechnicalFaq and the DSpace system documentation. You can also search the DSpace-tech archives or post a question to DSpace-tech.