Top Reasons to Use DSpace

“”Largest community of users and developers worldwide””

DSpace has over 800 organizations that are currently using the DSpace software in a production or project environment. The most common use is by research libraries as an institutional repository, however there are many organizations using the software to host and manage subject based repositories, dataset repositories or media based repositories. See a complete list of registered users here. For a map of all registered users visit here. A census of Institutional Repositories in the United States was done by CLIR in 2007 and found that DSpace was the preferred Institutional Repository system software of the 446 participants in the survey.

“”Free open source software””
The DSpace open source platform is available for free to anyone and can be downloaded from the sourceforge open source software repository. The code is currently licensed under the BSD open source license. This means that any organization can use, modify, and even integrate the code into their commercial application without paying any licensing fees. Of course we hope if you improve upon the software, you will contribute that code back to the community for everyone&qout;s benefit. Today there are more than 80 developers around the world contributing code, and there are fifteen lead developers (called committers) that work together to plan releases and integrate new features and bug fixes submitted by the community.

Compare DSpace software to other open source solutions to see if it best fits your needs. Here is a comparison of DSpace software to other open source repository platforms done by RSP, out of the United Kingdom.

“”Completely customizable to fit your needs””

Some of the key ways you can customize the DSpace application to suit your needs are as follows:

User interface – You can fully customize the look and feel of your DSpace website so it will integrate seamlessly with your own institution&qout;s website and can be more intuitive for your users. This is possible by using the Manakin extension, which is new to release 1.5.

Ability to customize the metadata – Dublin core is the default metadata format within the DSpace application, however you can add or change any field to customize it for you application. DSpace currently supports any non hierarchal flat name space. However, it is possible to ingest other hierarchal metadata schemas into DSpace such as MARC and MODS. This requires using tools such as crosswalk and having some technical capability to map the transfer of data.

OAI-PMH compatible.

Ability to configure Browse and Search – You can decide what fields you would like to display for browsing, such as author, title, date etc. on your DSpace website. You can also select any metadata fields you would like included in the search interface. All of the text within a given item and metadata associated with the item, are indexed for full text search if desired.

Configurable database -You can choose either Postgres or Oracle for the database which DSpace manages items and metadata.

Ability to choose the default language -The DSpace web application is available in over twenty languages so if english is not the local language you can customize.

“”Used by educational, government, private and commercial institutions””

The platform is used by higher education institutions for whom the platform was initially developed, and in addition the software has shown broad appeal. The software has been used by museums, state archives, museums, state and National Libraries, journal repositories, consortiums, and commercial companies to manage their digital assets. For a complete list of all registered users please visit here.

“”Can be installed out of the box
DSpace comes with an easily configurable web based interface, where any system administrator can install on a single Linux or Windows box to get started. To quickly install DSpace on your computer to test it out go to DSpace Live CD.

“”Can manage and preserve all types of digital content””