DSpace

This article is about the software package. For the complexity class, see DSPACE.

DSpace

Developer(s)	DuraSpace
Initial release	November 2002
Stable release	1.8.0 / 3 November 2011; 1 day ago (2011-11-03)
Development status	Active
Written in	Java
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Institutional repository software
License	BSD licence
Website	www.dspace.org

DSpace is an open source software package that provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly used as the basis for an institutional repository. It supports a wide variety of data, including books, theses, 3D digital scans of objects, photographs, film, video, research data sets and other forms of content. The data is arranged as community collections of items, which bundle bitstreams together.

DSpace is also intended as a platform for digital preservation activities. Since its release in 2002, as a product of the HP-MIT Alliance, it has been installed and is in production at over 800 institutions around the globe,^[1] from large universities to small higher education colleges, cultural organizations, and research centers. It is shared under a BSD licence, which enables users to customize or extend the software as needed.

History

The first version of DSpace was released in November 2002, following a joint effort by developers from MIT and HP Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In March 2004 the first DSpace User Group Meeting (DSUG) took place at Hotel@MIT, and it was there that the first discussions concerning the DSpace community and its future governance were discussed in earnest. The DSpace Federation formed a loose grouping of interested institutions, while the DSpace Committers group (see Community Development Model below) was formed shortly after, consisting of five developers from HP Labs, MIT, OCLC, University of Cambridge, and University of Edinburgh. Later two further developers from Australian National University and Texas A&M University also joined this group. DSpace 1.3 was released in 2005, and at around the same time the second DSpace User Group Meeting was held at the University of Cambridge. Following this, two further smaller user group meetings were spawned, the first in January/February 2006 in Sydney, and the second in April 2006 in Bergen, Norway. In March 2008, the DSpace Community released DSpace 1.5. A further user group meeting was held at the University of Gothenburg in October 2009^[2], at which the key features of the 1.6 release were shown. In March 2010, DSpace 1.6 was released, closely followed by the 1.7 release in December 2010.

DSpace Foundation

On 17 July 2007, HP and MIT jointly announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide leadership and support for the DSpace community.

DuraSpace

On 12 May 2009, Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation joined their organizations to pursue a common mission. The joint non-profit organization is called DuraSpace ^[3]. DuraSpace's mission is to provide leadership and innovation in open source and cloud-based technologies primarily for libraries, universities, research centers, and cultural heritage organizations. DuraSpace provides leadership and support for both DSpace and Fedora.

Community Development Model

The DSpace community has attempted to base its formal structure along the same lines as the Apache Foundation community development model. That is, there is a user-base, within which is contained a subset of developers, some of whom are contributors to the core codebase. The developments by these contributors are then added to the distribution under the curation of a core team of committers, whose job is to ensure that the code meets the various guidelines laid out in the developer documentation, and that it contributes effectively to the direction of DSpace development (which should be/is decided by the community as a whole). The community is serviced technologically by a development base at SourceForge, and a number of mailing lists for technical queries and development discussion, as well as a general list for non-technical community members.

Membership of the community is implied by being interested and involved - there are no formal membership fees or lists.

Technology

DSpace is written in Java. It uses a relational database, and supports the use of PostgreSQL and Oracle. It currently support two primary web interfaces—a classic one (JSPUI) which uses JSP and the Java Servlet API, and a newer interface (XMLUI) based on Apache Cocoon and using XML and XSLT technologies. DSpace holdings are made available primarily via a web interface, but it also supports the OAI-PMH v2.0, and is capable of exporting METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) packages. Future versions are likely to see increasing use of web services, and changes to the user interface layer.

DSpace supports the common interoperability standards used in the repository domain, such as Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, SWORD, OpenSearch, and RSS.

See also

Free software portal

• EPrints
• Fedora
• SWORD

References

1. ^ http://www.dspace.org/whos-using-dspace/Repository-List.html
2. ^ http://dsug09.ub.gu.se/index.php/dsug/dsug09
3. ^ http://www.duraspace.org

External links

• Wikiversity article discussing DSpace
• Official website
• DSpace Wiki
• Sites running DSpace software
• DSpace at MIT
• DSpace at The Open University, Sri Lanka