1. DSpace: Introduction and Starting an Institutional Repository
Eric Jansson -
NITLE -
AMICAL Conference 2007

2. Pre-workshop Preparation (10-15 minutes)
1. Register for a DSpace account on the NITLE DSpace instance
Go to
Signup for an account by clicking on “Sign On,” then “New user? Click here to register.”
Follow the process described.
2. Find one pieces of research (reports, papers, theses, posters, MP3 podcasts, etc) which you feel would be helpful to other AMICAL participants at the conference
3. Once you are done, place your name on the sheet provided.

3. Scholarly Communications
“Scholarly communication refers to the formal and informal processes by which the research and scholarship of academic staff, researchers, and independent scholars are created, evaluated, edited, formatted, distributed, organized, made accessible, archived, used, and transformed.” (SPARC Definition)

4. Scholarly Communications: The “Crisis”
Rising costs of access to scholarly research literature
Increasing output of scholarship and knowledge makes it tough to keep up
Loss of access to research materials
Increased presence of commercial publishers in the area

5. Scholarly Communications: The Promise of Going Digital
Scholars are working digitally
Vision of open access to scholarly materials is shared by an increasingly broad audience (e.g. MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative,
Digital formats and networks allow us to take a broader perspective on publishing (e.g. access to primary datasets)

7. What is wrong? Or, why not just publish research on your website?
Search and discovery is enormously time-consuming
manual inspection
limited social networks
simple discovery metadata is missing
Copyright/licenses/credits are missing or vague
Research data disconnected from the research
Preservation network not intact
individual effort needed
commercial interests involved
networks and systems that were intended to distribute, but not preserve

8. What is needed? Federated search and machine-assisted discovery
Processes involving those who are experts in information storage and dissemination (esp librarians!)
Bundling of related data and research
Technologies and processes that make campus and community-based preservation services efficient and effective

9. Institutional Repositories (IRs)
“A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.”
Clifford A. Lynch, "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. (quotation taken from

10. Scholarly Communications and IRs: What’s in it for Smaller Colleges?
What’s happening now?
Developing student scholars and scholarship programs
Capturing and preserve non-textual scholarship: fine arts, design, etc.
Preserving campus historical record digitally: newspapers, publications, etc.
Digitally preserving and publishing historical campus materials
And of course, publishing faculty research

11. Scholarly Communications and IRs: What’s in it for Smaller Colleges?
And some trends to watch
Digital technologies connecting teaching and research
Research communities becoming virtual
“virtual organizations”, cf.

12. Creating an IR Service Model
What is the service’s mission?
What kinds of content will you accept?
Who are the key users?
Who are the key stakeholders?
What services would you offer if you had unlimited resources?
What can you afford to offer?
Will you charge for services?
What responsibilities will the library bear versus the content community?
What are your top service priorities?
What are the short-term priorities and long-term priorities?
From “LEarning About Digital Institutional Repositories. Creating an Institutional Repository: LEADIRS Workbook”,
Institutional Repositories are not technologies - they are primarily policies and organizational commitments
IRs and DAM are less a technology than a set of policies and social commitments.

13. DSpace Structure

14. DSpace Structure
"Community" is a grouping of collections and/or "Sub-communities"
"Collection" is a group of related items in an archive.
"Items" are records that describe the file(s) being archived, using the Dublin Core metadata scheme
"Bundle" is a grouping of files associated with an item
"Bitstreams" are the individual files grouped together in a bundle and associated with an item. (e.g. license text, jpegs, tiffs, pdfs, doc, xml)

15. Sample DSpace Structure

16. DSpace: Search and Discovery (Hands-on)
Look at one of these DSpace instances
What content is captured in the repository?
What media are represented in the repository?
How is the repository organized?
MIT (
University of Cambridge (
Ohio State University: Knowledge Bank (
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (
Swinburne University (
Texas Digital Library (

17. DSpace: Submission Workflow

18. DSpace: Submission Workflow
Community creation (demo)
Collection and workflow creation (demo)
Workflow process (hands-on)
Collection and workflow creation practice (hands on, time-permitting)

19. DSpace Workflow Hands-on
Working in teams of 2…
Login to DSpace
Person 1: submit an item to “AMICAL Research”; logout
Person 2: login as editor and review item; logout
Person 1: login and finish metadata

20. DSpace: Syndication and Discovery
Handles
Subscribing to collections
RSS Feeds
RSS Reader (demo)
OAI interface (demo)
id]

21. DSpace: Looking Ahead The technology The initiative
Skins and customized interfaces (on the way)
Configurable workflows (on the way)
Framework for extensions (recommendation)
The initiative
CLIR Report: DSpace #1 IR in U.S. (46.4% of surveyed)
DSpace Foundation
New Executive Director, new commitments, etc.
Best practices and lessons learned

22. DSpace: the “F” Word “Forever” Implies a very, very long time
Is DSpace ONLY good for this?
Cataloging and publishing are academic experiences
Repository development can play roles bounded by time
What happens when transience of Web 2.0 meets the seriousness of the IR…
“Fun”

23. Further Information DSpace website http://www.dspace.org/
Lessons Learned in DSpace wiki
LEADIRS Workbook
DSpace Functional Overview
NITLE DSpace User Community
NITLE’s DSpace