Introduction to DSpace

DSpace captures your data in any format – in text, video, audio, and data. It distributes it over the web. It indexes your work, so users can search and retrieve your items. It preserves your digital work over the long term.

DSpace provides a way to manage your research materials and publications in a professionally maintained repository to give them greater visibility and accessibility over time.

Benefits of Using DSpace

* Getting your research results out quickly, to a worldwide audience
* Reaching a worldwide audience through exposure to search engines such as Google
* Storing reusable teaching materials that you can use with course management systems
* Archiving and distributing material you would currently put on your personal website
* Storing examples of students’ projects (with the students’ permission)
* Showcasing students’ theses (again with permission)
* Keeping track of your own publications/bibliography
* Having a persistent network identifier for your work, that never changes or breaks
* No more page charges for images. You can point to your images’ persistent identifiers in your published articles.

Visualizing DSpace

DSpace is freely available as open source software. See the accompanying DSpace diagram (PDF) that desribes visually how DSpace works.

How do you add your content?

DSpace is easy to use. You use your web browser to submit content and search or browse its collections.

To submit content, you upload the file(s) and add descriptive information including title, author, publication information, and keywords. This descriptive data is known as metadata.

To add your content, though, you must belong to a DSpace community. Speak with your library’s staff to learn more about DSpace communities.