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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
[email protected] ortel: 0121 414 1312
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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