1. A DSpace Institutional Repository
A DSpace Institutional Repository
Hello. I’m Sue Kunda and I’m the Digital Production Librarian at Oregon State University where we’ve been using DSpace as our institutional repository platform for the past 5 years. I’m going to spend my fifteen minutes to talk a little about the features and functionality of the DSpace platform and share how we’ve grown our IR into one of the top ten university-based repositories in the United States.
Sue Kunda
Institutional Repositories:
Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship
September 30, 2009

2. DSpace, a joint venture between the M. I. T
DSpace, a joint venture between the M.I.T. Libraries and Hewlett Packard Labs is an open source IR platform for managing, providing access to, preserving, and sharing digital content. When developing the software, both M.I.T. and HP felt strongly that open source software was the fundamental key to building a vigorous user community which would then contribute to, and drive the development of the platform into the future.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

3. That theory has definitely played out as there are now more than 600 instances of DSpace in more than 60 countries – 200 of which have started just within the past year. In 2007 the DSpace Foundation was formed to provide support to this rapidly growing community of DSpace Users. While the foundation provides the leadership, the committer group, which is made up of 15 developers from around the world, is responsible for the shape and direction of the DSpace software, as well as its future architecture and design. Other developers contribute code to the platform, and a global outreach committee works to provide regional support, training, user group meetings, and tools for the worldwide user community. As you can see the development of DSpace is truly an international effort.
Used with permission of DSpace.org
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

4. Benefits of DSpace Open Source Out-of-the Box Installation
Customizable
OAI-PMH Compliant
Indexed by Search Engines
Permanent URLs
Supports Common File Formats and Types
Service Providers
Because it’s open source, any organization can use, modify, and even integrate the code into their commercial application without paying licensing fees.
You can download DSpace and begin using it right out of the box without any customization. It’ll
You can, however, if you want, customize DSpace to meet the needs of your organization. For example, at OSU, we’ve customized the user interface, the metadata schema (which, by default is Qualified Dublin Core), and the submission process. We’ve added a more robust statistics package (which will be available in future versions) and plan to upgrade to the Manakin interface in the next year, which will give us even more options for seamlessly integrating the IR into the OSU community.
DSpace is OAI-PMH compliant, making all public content (both metadata and text files) open to Google, Google Scholar, and other search engines.
DSpace uses the handle system to assign permanent urls, which never break or disappear.
It’s possible to assign simple access rights by item, which we’ve done at times for graduate students who plan to publish their thesis or dissertation and don’t want it accessible to the general public.
Dspace can manage and preserve all types of digital content such as journal articles, reports, conference proceedings, images, moving images, sound recordings and datasets and it can handle all types of file formats including PDF, Word, JPEG, MPEG, and TIFF.
There are a number of service providers to help with design, documentation, installation, migrations, configurations, hosting, training
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

5. Faculty Research under Cascades Campus and so on.
DSpace uses a hierarchical information model and is organized into communities and collections. Communities (in a university setting) are groups of people united around an academic unit such as department, labs, research centers or schools. Here you can see some of the communities in ScholarsArchive.
Then, there are collections, which are groups of related items belonging to those communities. For example, a department might have collections for their technical reports, theses and dissertations, and/or faculty research. Here are the communities I just showed you with their associated collections. Communities also can have sub-communities and that’s why you see Baseball under Athletics,
Faculty Research under Cascades Campus and so on.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

6. and a listing of items in that collection.
And items are the objects in a collection. Things like an individual thesis, a photograph, a map, an article, or a chapter from a book. Here’s a collection in ScholarsArchive (Utility Pole Research Cooperative)…
and a listing of items in that collection.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

7. A submitter uses a web-based interface to deposit files and their associated metadata into DSpace. These files can be anything from a simple text document to datasets to digital video, and an item can consist of a single file or multiple files of varying formats. For example, we have electronic theses and dissertations that also include maps, sound recordings, Excel spreadsheets, and more. The submitter fills out a submission form with descriptive metadata, attaches the file (or files), assigns the appropriate licenses and submits it all to DSpace. The item is then reviewed by an authorized administrator and uploaded to the Web. DSpace automatically assigns technical and administrative metadata to the item. The end-user interface supports browsing and searching the archives. Once an item is located the files are either displayed in a Web browser or prompt the user to download and open the file with a suitable application program.
Used with permission of DSpace.org
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

8. Now, shifting to the OSU Libraries’ instance of DSpace
Now, shifting to the OSU Libraries’ instance of DSpace. In September of 2003 the University Librarian appointed a task force to explore institutional repositories as a means to manage OSU research and scholarship and facilitate the exchange of scholarly communication between OSU researchers and the rest of the world. This task force investigated the various IR platforms available at the time and recommended DSpace because of its growing user base, adequate functionality, and community based structure that I described earlier. DSpace was installed in
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

9. One of our earliest partners was the Graduate School
One of our earliest partners was the Graduate School. We’d started discussions with them in the late 1990s about an electronic theses and dissertations collection, but for a variety of reasons, the conversation lagged until we got our instance of DSpace, named ScholarsArchive, up and running.
We started with one interested department, the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in July 2005 and there were so few problems with the workflow and process that all departments on campus agreed to require both P.h.D. and Master’s students, beginning in July 2006 and January 2007 respectively, to submit their research to the IR.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

10. Since then we’ve added close to 3000 theses and dissertations, making it our largest collection. Items in the collection have been downloaded more than 300,000 times in the past year for an average of 102 downloads. It’s interesting to compare that to our 2004 theses and dissertations, which aren’t in ScholarsArchive and can only be accessed through our catalog. Those theses and dissertations have circulated, on average, two times.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

11. Secrets to Success Find Early Partners Develop Strong Relationships
Initiate Digitization Program
We knew we could require graduate students to deposit their scholarship into ScholarsArchive but it was a different story for our faculty. So while we began talks with various departments on campus about the benefits of placing their faculty publications into ScholarsArchive we also began digitizing departmental research (technical bulletins, research reports, all that “gray literature) already available in the library’s collection. We had two subject librarians who were avid supporters of the institutional repository right from the start and were instrumental in making sure that their department’s collections were digitized. They then touted those collections in discussions with faculty and departmental administration; it’s no surprise that those two departments are now exploring how best to get their faculty publications into ScholarsArchive also.
So finding early partners on campus, having strong liaison relationships between librarians and departments, and instituting a digitization program were three factors in the success of our IR.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

12. It’s not just academic departments and colleges that are seeing the value of ScholarsArchive. Several faculty members with ties to other organizations have sought us out in order to collect, manage, archive, and make their publications accessible, and because we take our responsibilities as a land grant university very seriously we’ve worked with various stakeholders to deposit important Oregon documents, conference proceedings, policies, etc. into ScholarsArchive. These items can now be accessed by any Oregon citizen with an Internet connection.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

13. One of our greatest successes is our collaboration with the Extension and Experiment Station Communications Department. They’re using ScholarsArchive exactly how we want faculty and academic units to use it. We first got them interested in ScholarsArchive by digitizing an entire series made up of more than 1000 items, and while we continued to digitize and add other series to the collection we also had discussions with them about placing their future publications in ScholarsArchive. The current publications director saw the advantage to using ScholarsArchive to collect, provide access to, and preserve their documents and we’re now working to digitize the rest of their collections while they’re depositing electronic files directly into ScholarsArchive as items are published.
Other campus units that are consistently adding to their collections are the Forestry Department (the Forest Research Laboratory publishes Case Studies and Forest Research Policy Papers, among other items), the Rural Studies Program regularly contributes white papers to the IR, and students from the Honors College, COAS, Bioresources Research, and Public Policy are required to deposit their research papers into ScholarsArchive.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

14. Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship 09/30/09

15. DSpace is most often used by academic libraries to house student and faculty research. There are many organizations, however, that use the software for other purposes and I’d like to close by taking a look at some of those IRs:
Here is New York University’s collection of Afghanistan publications from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Because of the ravages of war during that era, Afghanistan’s publishing history is in danger of completely disappearing so NYU is collecting, preserving, and making available as many manuscripts as possible:
This is Swinburne University’s image collection which contains nearly 4000 images documenting more than 400 years of the history of this university:
Here is the Virtual Olympic Museum created for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. This site is amazing with an historical multimedia experience as well as information about every aspect of the modern Olympics, starting with the 1896 Athens Games.
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09

16. References Sue Kunda: sue. kunda@oregonstate
References Sue Kunda: DSpace Foundation: Afghanistan Digital Library: Swinburne Image Bank: Virtual Olympic Museum:
Sue Kunda Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship /30/09