The DSpace Digital Repository System [LWN.net]

DSpace is a jointly developed project from the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard with project guidance provided by the DSpace Federation.

The project is described as:

A groundbreaking digital repository system, DSpace captures, stores, indexes, preserves and redistributes an organization's research material in digital formats. Research institutions worldwide use DSpace for a variety of digital archiving needs -- from institutional repositories (IRs) to learning object repositories or electronic records management, and more.

[DSpace] The project introduction explains that DSpace can be used for creating a variety of online archives. Supported data types include articles, papers, and reports, theses, data sets, images, audio and video files, learning objects, and distributed library collections. The DSpace Instances document includes a long list of educational institutions that are currently using the software.

Here are a few project details: the DSpace software is written in Java, it has been released under the BSD License. DSpace is cross-platform software, with support for Unix and Windows. Both command line and web-based user interfaces are provided.

The End User FAQ has more general information on the project. One interesting feature of DSpace is the use of the Handle System as a method of identifying data. "The developers chose to use handles instead of persistent URLs to support citations to items in DSpace over very long time spans longer than we believe the HTTP protocol will last. Handles in DSpace are currently implemented as URLs, but can also be modified to work with future protocols."

The DSpace System Documentation and architecture documents describe the underlying system in more detail.

Version 1.2.2 beta 2 of DSpace was announced this week: "This release contains bugfixes and some minor new features from 1.2.2 beta 1. This includes postgres 8.0 compatibility, and community/collection strength display". DSpace is available for download here.

to post comments

The DSpace Digital Repository System

Posted Apr 8, 2005 19:02 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

The Handle System, written in Java and available for download at no cost for research or experimental use...

Wow. A pay-now solution for a problem that might appear when HTTP and URLs eventually become obsolete. I am so underwhelmed.

The DSpace Digital Repository System

Posted Sep 29, 2005 11:17 UTC (Thu) by pkolloch (subscriber, #21709) [Link]

Well, I have to agree. In addition, their handle system seems to provide simple functionality which might be easily replicated (or am I naive again? ;) ). So why aren't they doing it themselves to get a fully open source system?

DSpace is available under the BSD open source license for research institutions to run as-is, or to modify and extend as needed. (from the dspace webpage)

Does that mean that DSpace is only available under an open source license for research institutions? Well, that wouldn't be really effective, because they could then redistribute it more freely... Or?

The DSpace Digital Repository System

Posted Apr 9, 2005 11:08 UTC (Sat) by clive (guest, #14876) [Link]

We've implemented an evaluation DSpace repository at Bromley College in the UK and it comes over as powerful and fully featured.

I'd recommend anyone considering implementing a digital repository having a look at DSpace.

To help others I've put together a blog describing my DSpace installation experiences on Fedora Core 3 at http://www.linuxtraining.org.uk/blogger.html