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DspaceDigital Repository

www.dspace.org

Dawn Petherick, University Web Services Team Manager

Information Services, University of Birmingham

MIDESS Dissemination event, 4th May 2007

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Overview of MIDESS at Birmingham

Why did we get involved?

Local objectives

A pilot

Outcomes

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Overview of Features

OAI-PMH Compliant Data Provider

Support for custom metadata schemes

Delegated collection management Persistent URLs (via handle service)

Unrestricted file format support

Unicode enabled

Web based administration (for common tasks)

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Communities, Collections & Items

Items: Items are the compound digital objectsheld within the repository. They usually consistof a metadata record and any number of files.Items can be mapped so that a single item can be

found in many collections.

Dspace uses the concepts of communities and

collections to manage the hierarchy of Items with

the repository.

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Communities, Collections & Items II

Collections: All Items are held in one, or more

collection in the repository. Each collection can

have its own copyright notice and submission

licence and authorisations or it can inherit thesefrom its parent community.

Communities: All collections are held in a

community. Each community can hold multiple

collections or other sub-communities but cannothold items.

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Users & Groups

Internally DSpace creates its own e-personrecord to manage user rights over collections &items.

Users can be assigned to groups which can holddevolved authorisation over collections & items.

If no specific authorisation is given, then theparent collection/community rights are applied.

Item submissions can be moderated by acollection administrator before being added tothe collection.

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Users & Groups II

DSpace can also use LDAP (LightweightDirectory Access Protocol) to manage centralauthentication.

This feature can be used to create a DSpace e-person record if one doesnt already exist.

This method could be used to define a group foran LDAP user, although this requiresmodifications to the source code.

Shibboleth authentication may now be availableas a third party patch.

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Custom Metadata

On a default installation DSpace stores an items

metadata record using a Qualified Dublin Core

scheme.

This can also be extended with additional

qualifications and elements not found in Dublin

Core if required.

However, it maintains the same format for the

new field as QDC; a metadata element with asingle optional qualifier.

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Custom Metadata II

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Custom Metadata III

Adding a new metadata field to the registry does

not add that field into the submission workflow.

The workflows can be altered for each collection,

but can only be altered within the xmlconfiguration files within the DSpace source

code.

Following a change to these files rebuilding and

redeploying the web application is necessary.

Other areas need deeper changes to the source

code to reflect the changes to the metadata

registry.

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Item Import & Export

DSpace includes command line functionality that

that is used to manage the batch import / export

of items within the repository.

This function was primarily designed as a backupand restore for server migrations. It could

however be used to transfer collections between

institutions if required.

This facility can also be used to export items into

a METS object, using DC MODS conversion for

the metadata. Currently there is no analogous

METS import facility

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OAI-PMH Compliance

DSpace provides a target interface to the items

held within the repository, compliant with OAI-

PMH protocol version 2.0.

OAI-PMH provides support for multiple metadata

formats to be provided by the target, as such

DSpace exposes metadata in oai_dc & mets.

DSpace also provides a plug-in system for

additional metadata formats such as thosecreated by the JISC Repository Bridge project.

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OAI-PMH Compliance II

DSpace doesnt provide an OAI-PMH client, so it

is not possible to point DSpace to another target

repository and ask it to fetch all of the metadata

records to be included within the local searches.

As part of the MIDESS project weve been

investigating the creation of a separate program

that would act as a harvester and output objects

which could then be imported into DSpace usingits import program.

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DSpaces Weaknesses

Lacks substantial support for importing external

(non-DSpace) items.

Currently no support for packaged compound

items such as Learning Objects, beyond storing

the zip file with a metadata record.

Manages View/Open in the same way for all types

of files, by sending the output over the http

connection to the browser and letting that decidehow to open the file.

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DSpaces Weaknesses

File level metadata within items is very limited

and files cannot be structured within an Item.

As DSpace is open source software it relies on

the community of users & developers for support

and documentation. Support is generally limited

to mailing lists (which are usually very helpful)

but the published documentation can lag behind

the released version of the software.

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DSpace version 1.5

The DSpace community is currently working on

release 1.5 of the repository and are currently

listing the following key improvements:

Interface layer will be changed to support the

manakin xml user interface system which should

enable a higher level of customisation to be

achieved.

Underlying changes to the way DSpace manageschanges to the data model of the repository.

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DSpace version 1.5

New mechanism for supporting Add Ons within

Dspace. This should make it easier to distribute

and install additional functionality to the core

DSpace package.

General bug-fixes and community patches, as

released on the projects source forge pages.

The roadmap for DSpace can be found at:

http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/RoadMap

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Further technical questions

Contact Matt Martin, Digital Library

Technical Analyst at

m.p.martin@bham.ac.uk ortel: 0121 414 1312

mailto:m.p.martin@bham.ac.ukmailto:m.p.martin@bham.ac.uk

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The way forward for U of B?

Evaluate e-prints v3

Discussions with e-learning colleagues

about RLOs Recommendations/Repository Strategy

for Senior Management:

Open source vc commercial

One vs many repositpories