Introduction to DSpace Iryna Kuchma Open Access Programme Manager Attribution 3.0 Unported

Top Reasons to Use DSpace Largest community of users and developers worldwide Free open source software Completely customizable to fit your needs Used by educational, government, private and commercial institutions Can be installed out of the box Can manage and preserve all types of digital content

1322 DSpace instances in almost 100 countries worldwide dspace

What does DSpace look like?

The DSpace Community Each DSpace service is comprised of Communities – the highest level of the DSpace content hierarchy Communities may be: Departments Labs Research Centres Schools Each community contains descriptive metadata about itself and the collections contained within it

The DSpace Collection Each community in turn have collections which contain items or files Collections can belong to a single community or multiple communities (collaboration between communities may result in a shared collection) As with communities, each collection contains descriptive metadata about itself and the items contained within it

What is an item? An item is made up of: –Metadata –Bundles (e.g. ORIGINAL / LICENCE / TEXT) –Bitstreams

What’s metadata? Metadata is "data about data", of any sort in any media. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple content items. Metadata (sometimes written 'meta data') are used to facilitate the understanding, characteristics, and management usage of data. The metadata required for effective data management varies with the type of data and context of use (e.g. metadata about a title would typically include a description of the content, the author; in the context of a camera, where the data are the photographic image, metadata would typically include the date the photograph was taken and details of the camera settings (lens, focal length, aperture, shutter timing, white balance, etc.) (

Types of metadata The are two broad types of metadata 1. Descriptive metadata 1. Administrative metadata The title is “A brief history of time” The item was deposited on 28 th May 2008 at 20:25

Encoding metadata Metadata is encoded using metadata schemas DSpace uses Dublin Core by default –Schema = ‘dc’ –Qualified Dublin Core –Elements E.g. Title / Creator / Subject / Description –Qualifiers E.g. Title.main / Title.subtitle / Title.series –E.g. dc.identifier.citation

Credits These slides have been produced re-using The DSpace Course by: –Stuart Lewis & Chris Yates –Repository Support Project –Part of the RepositoryNet –Funded by JISC

Thank you! Questions?