DSpace

DSpace is an open source software package that provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly used as the basis for institutional repositories.

DSpace preserves and enables easy and open access to all types of digital content including text, images, moving images, mpegs and data sets.

DSpace is sustained and improved by DuraSpace.

Top reasons to use DSpace:

The largest community of users and developers worldwide - over 1100 organizations currently use the DSpace software in a production or project environment.
Free and open source software - the DSpace open source platform is available for free to anyone and can be downloaded from the sourceforge open source software repository. The code is currently licensed under the BSD open source license. This means that any organization can use, modify, and even integrate the code into their commercial application without paying any licensing fees.
Completely customizable to fit your needs - ability to customize or theme the user interface and the metadata, standards compatible (OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, SWORD, WebDAV, OpenSearch, OpenURL, RSS, ATOM), ability to configure Browse and Search, ability to use local Authentication mechanisms (LDAP, Shibboleth, X.509, IP-based), configurable database (PostgreSQL or Oracle), ability to choose the default language.
The most common use is by research libraries as an institutional repository, however there are many organizations (museums, state archives, state and National Libraries, journal repositories, consortiums, and commercial companies) using the software to host and manage subject based repositories, dataset repositories, media based repositories or other digital assets.
Can be installed out of the box - DSpace comes with an easily configurable web based interface, which any system administrator can install on a single Linux, Mac OSX or Windows box to get started.
Can manage and preserve all types of digital content - the DSpace application can recognize and manage a large number of file format and mime types (some of the most common formats currently managed within the DSpace environment are PDF, Word, JPEG, MPEG, TIFF files).

Read the news article about the Themed Week online session (including links to the recording of the session and the Q&A wiki).

Go to the DSpace homepage

Download the DSpace software

View Open Access course materials (in English) about using tools like DSpace for creating digital repositories in small institutions, prepared by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre in Poland (Login as a Guest)

Read a paper describing the development of a DSpace Digital Repository at EIFL member Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya in Nepal.

Read a case study about the development of the SABER repository in Mozambique.

View a presentation by Tatyana Zaytseva (EIFL FOSS Coordinator for Azerbaijan) about the experiences of Khazar University Library with DSpace.

Access the FOSS Digital Repositories Choice Matrix from KIT (Royal Tropical Institute, Netherlands), which compares DSpace with other FOSS digital repository tools.

Check out SUNScholar/Practical guidelines for starting an institutional repository (IR) and and SUNScholar/Audit

DSpace repositories in EIFL partner countries.

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