DSpace: Introduction and Starting an Institutional

Repository

Eric Jansson - eric.jansson@nitle.org

NITLE - http://www.nitle.org

AMICAL Conference 2007

Pre-workshop Preparation (10-15 minutes)

1. Register for a DSpace account on the NITLE DSpace instance– Go to http://dspace.nitle.org– Signup for an account by clicking on “Sign On,” then “New

user? Click here to register.”– Follow the process described.

2. Find one pieces of research (reports, papers, theses, posters, MP3 podcasts, etc) which you feel would be helpful to other AMICAL participants at the conference

3. Once you are done, place your name on the sheet provided.

Scholarly Communications

“Scholarly communication refers to the formal and informal processes by which the research and scholarship of academic staff, researchers, and independent scholars are created, evaluated, edited, formatted, distributed, organized, made accessible, archived, used, and transformed.” (SPARC Definition)

Scholarly Communications: The “Crisis”

• Rising costs of access to scholarly research literature

• Increasing output of scholarship and knowledge makes it tough to keep up

• Loss of access to research materials

• Increased presence of commercial publishers in the area

Scholarly Communications: The Promise of Going Digital

• Scholars are working digitally• Vision of open access to scholarly materials

is shared by an increasingly broad audience (e.g. MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, http://ocw.mit.edu/)

• Digital formats and networks allow us to take a broader perspective on publishing (e.g. access to primary datasets)

What is wrong?Or, why not just publish research on your

website?

• Search and discovery is enormously time-consuming – manual inspection– limited social networks– simple discovery metadata is missing

• Copyright/licenses/credits are missing or vague• Research data disconnected from the research• Preservation network not intact

– individual effort needed– commercial interests involved– networks and systems that were intended to distribute, but

not preserve

What is needed?

• Federated search and machine-assisted discovery

• Processes involving those who are experts in information storage and dissemination (esp librarians!)

• Bundling of related data and research • Technologies and processes that make

campus and community-based preservation services efficient and effective

Institutional Repositories (IRs)

“A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.”

Clifford A. Lynch, "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7. (quotation taken from http://dspace.org/introduction/irs.html)

Scholarly Communications and IRs: What’s in it for Smaller Colleges?

• What’s happening now?– Developing student scholars and scholarship

programs– Capturing and preserve non-textual scholarship:

fine arts, design, etc.– Preserving campus historical record digitally:

newspapers, publications, etc.– Digitally preserving and publishing historical

campus materials– And of course, publishing faculty research

Scholarly Communications and IRs: What’s in it for Smaller Colleges?

• And some trends to watch– Digital technologies connecting teaching

and research– Research communities becoming virtual

• “virtual organizations”, cf. http://connect.educause.edu/blog/mpasiewicz/an_interview_with_cliff_lynch/15524?time=1179524554

Creating an IR Service Model

• What is the service’s mission? • What kinds of content will you accept? • Who are the key users? • Who are the key stakeholders? • What services would you offer if you had unlimited resources? • What can you afford to offer? • Will you charge for services? • What responsibilities will the library bear versus the content community? • What are your top service priorities? • What are the short-term priorities and long-term priorities?

From “LEarning About Digital Institutional Repositories. Creating an Institutional Repository: LEADIRS Workbook”, http://www.dspace.org/implement/leadirs.pdf

Institutional Repositories are not technologies - they are primarily policies and organizational commitments

DSpace Structure

DSpace Structure

"Community" is a grouping of collections and/or "Sub-communities"

"Collection" is a group of related items in an archive.

"Items" are records that describe the file(s) being archived, using the Dublin Core metadata scheme

"Bundle" is a grouping of files associated with an item

"Bitstreams" are the individual files grouped together in a bundle and associated with an item. (e.g. license text, jpegs, tiffs, pdfs, doc, xml)

Sample DSpace Structure

DSpace: Search and Discovery(Hands-on)

Look at one of these DSpace instances– What content is captured in the repository?– What media are represented in the repository?– How is the repository organized?

• MIT (http://dspace.mit.edu/)• University of Cambridge (http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/)• Ohio State University: Knowledge Bank

(https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/index.jsp)• Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis

(http://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/)• Swinburne University (http://images.swinburne.edu.au/)• Texas Digital Library (http://repositories.tdl.org/)

DSpace: Submission Workflow

DSpace: Submission Workflow

• Community creation (demo)

• Collection and workflow creation (demo)

• Workflow process (hands-on)

• Collection and workflow creation practice (hands on, time-permitting)

DSpace WorkflowHands-on

• Working in teams of 2…

• Login to DSpace

• Person 1: submit an item to “AMICAL Research”; logout

• Person 2: login as editor and review item; logout

• Person 1: login and finish metadata

DSpace: Syndication and Discovery

• Handles• Subscribing to collections• RSS Feeds

– RSS Reader (demo)

• OAI interface (demo)• http://dspace.nitle.org/dspace-oai/request?verb=ListRecords

&metadataPrefix=oai_dc• http://dspace.nitle.org/dspace-oai/request?verb=ListSets• http://dspace.nitle.org/dspace-oai/request?verb=ListRecords

&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=[set id]

DSpace: Looking Ahead

• The technology– Skins and customized interfaces (on the way)– Configurable workflows (on the way)– Framework for extensions (recommendation)

• The initiative– CLIR Report: DSpace #1 IR in U.S. (46.4% of

surveyed)• http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub140/pub140.pdf

– DSpace Foundation • New Executive Director, new commitments, etc.

– Best practices and lessons learned

DSpace: the “F” Word

• “Forever”– Implies a very, very long time– Is DSpace ONLY good for this?

• Cataloging and publishing are academic experiences

• Repository development can play roles bounded by time

• What happens when transience of Web 2.0 meets the seriousness of the IR…

• “Fun”

Further Information

• DSpace website http://www.dspace.org/• Lessons Learned in DSpace wiki

http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/LessonsLearned• LEADIRS Workbook

http://www.dspace.org/implement/leadirs.pdf• DSpace Functional Overview

http://www.dspace.org/technology/system-docs/functional.html

• NITLE DSpace User Community http://apps.nitle.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=68

• NITLE’s DSpace http://dspace.nitle.org