DSpace: Introduction and
Starting an Institutional
Repository
Eric Jansson - eric.jansson@nitle.org
NITLE - http://www.nitle.org
AMICAL Conference 2007
Pre-workshop Preparation (1015 minutes)
1. Register for a DSpace account on the NITLE DSpace
instance
– Go to http://dspace.nitle.org
– 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.
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)
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
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,
http://ocw.mit.edu/)
• Digital formats and networks allow us to take
a broader perspective on publishing (e.g.
access to primary datasets)
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
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
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
http://dspace.org/introduction/irs.html)
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
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.
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/mpasiewicz/an_intervie
w_with_cliff_lynch/15524?time=1179524554
Creating an IR Service Model
Institutional
Repositories are
not technologies they are primarily
policies and
organizational
commitments
• 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”,
http://www.dspace.org/implement/leadirs.pdf
DSpace Structure
DSpace Structure
"Community" is a grouping of collections and/or "Subcommunities"
"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)
Sample DSpace Structure
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 (http://dspace.mit.edu/)
• University of Cambridge (http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/)
• Ohio State University: Knowledge Bank
(https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/index.jsp)
• Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
(http://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/)
• Swinburne University (http://images.swinburne.edu.au/)
• Texas Digital Library (http://repositories.tdl.org/)
DSpace: Submission
Workflow
DSpace: Submission
Workflow
•
•
•
•
Community creation (demo)
Collection and workflow creation (demo)
Workflow process (hands-on)
Collection and workflow creation
practice (hands on, time-permitting)
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
DSpace: Syndication and
Discovery
• Handles
• Subscribing to collections
• RSS Feeds
– RSS Reader (demo)
• OAI interface (demo)
• http://dspace.nitle.org/dspaceoai/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
• http://dspace.nitle.org/dspace-oai/request?verb=ListSets
• http://dspace.nitle.org/dspaceoai/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=[set id]
DSpace: Looking Ahead
• The technology
– 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)
• http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub140/pub140.pdf
– DSpace Foundation
• New Executive Director, new commitments, etc.
– Best practices and lessons learned
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”
Further Information
• DSpace website http://www.dspace.org/
• Lessons Learned in DSpace wiki
http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/LessonsLearned
• LEADIRS Workbook
http://www.dspace.org/implement/leadirs.pdf
• DSpace Functional Overview
http://www.dspace.org/technology/systemdocs/functional.html
• NITLE DSpace User Community
http://apps.nitle.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=68
• NITLE’s DSpace http://dspace.nitle.org