An Introduction to DSpace - How to Get Help; Repository Structure; Items in Dspace, Users and Groups; An Introduction to Metadata in Dspace.

1. Introduction to
DSpace
Iryna Kuchma
Open Access Programme Manager
Open Access and the Evolving Scholarly Communication
Environment workshop, July 11, 2012, Makerere University
www.eifl.net Attribution 3.0 Unported

3. Top Reasons to Use
DSpace
Largest community of users and developers
worldwide
Free open source software
Completely customizable to fit your needs
Used by educational, government, private
and commercial institutions
Can be installed out of the box
Can manage and preserve all types of digital
content

4. 1322 DSpace instances in almost 100
countries worldwide
http://www.dspace.org/whos-using-
dspace

6. What does DSpace look like?
http://www.dspace.org/images/stories/dspace-diagram.pdf

12. The DSpace Community
Each DSpace service is comprised of
Communities – the highest level of the DSpace
content hierarchy
Communities may be:
• Departments
• Labs
• Research Centres
• Schools
Each community contains descriptive metadata
about itself and the collections contained within it

13. The DSpace Collection
Each community in turn have collections which
contain items or files
Collections can belong to a single community or
multiple communities (collaboration between
communities may result in a shared collection)
As with communities, each collection contains
descriptive metadata about itself and the items
contained within it

14. What is an item?
An item is made up of:
– Metadata
– Bundles (e.g. ORIGINAL / LICENCE / TEXT)
– Bitstreams

15. What’s metadata?
Metadata is "data about data", of any sort in any media. An item of
metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a
collection of data including multiple content items.
Metadata (sometimes written 'meta data') are used to facilitate the
understanding, characteristics, and management usage of data.
The metadata required for effective data management varies with
the type of data and context of use (e.g. metadata about a title
would typically include a description of the content, the author; in
the context of a camera, where the data are the photographic
image, metadata would typically include the date the photograph
was taken and details of the camera settings (lens, focal length,
aperture, shutter timing, white balance, etc.)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata)

16. Types of metadata
The are two broad types of metadata
1. Descriptive metadata
The title is “A brief
history of time”
2. Administrative metadata
The item was
deposited on 28th
May 2008 at 20:25

17. Encoding metadata
Metadata is encoded using metadata
schemas
DSpace uses Dublin Core by default
– Schema = ‘dc’
– Qualified Dublin Core
– Elements
• E.g. Title / Creator / Subject / Description
– Qualifiers
• E.g. Title.main / Title.subtitle / Title.series
– E.g. dc.identifier.citation

19. Credits
These slides have been produced re-using
The DSpace Course by:
– Stuart Lewis & Chris Yates
– Repository Support Project
http://www.rsp.ac.uk/
– Part of the RepositoryNet
– Funded by JISC
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/

20. Thank you! Questions?