DSpace Elevator Pitch

This “elevator pitch” offers a brief statement about DSpace, which you can customize to your university and your service offerings, using all or part of this text. (An “elevator pitch” is a quick 30-second speech that sells an idea in the time it takes to ride the elevator with someone.)

Audience: Faculty, Administrators, Library Staff, Alumni

DSpace is a groundbreaking digital repository for the digital intellectual output of a university. It is designed to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute research material in digital formats.

DSpace addresses a problem that faculty have been expressing to librarians for the past few years. Faculty have been developing research material and scholarly publications in increasingly complex digital formats. Preserving and distributing this content is a time-consuming chore for individual faculty and their departments to manage themselves. DSpace manages your research material and publications in a professionally maintained archive and gives them greater visibility and accessibility over time.

DSpace collects and stores content in Communities – such as schools, departments, labs, and centers. This makes participation easy because communities can adapt the system to meet their individual needs and manage the submission process themselves. The library provides guidance to establish new communities, and assistance to faculty and others to use the system.

Libraries are working to extend their services into the digital era, to reflect current trends in scholarly communication and education, and to offer new means of distributing research material that are enabled by network technology. Developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP), DSpace is now freely available to research institutions worldwide as an open source system that can be customized and extended.

As an institutional repository that represents the scholarship of the university, DSpace showcases the international prominence of the faculty both individually and collectively. The interdisciplinary content of the archive attracts a wider audience than a repository dedicated to one individual discipline. This ability to distribute research results quickly also emphasizes the cutting-edge nature of the university’s research.

The university’s faculty research output will be valuable to researchers far into the future, but preserving digital material: publications, datasets, images, visualizations, and so on, is extremely difficult. As a preservation archive, DSpace helps to ensure long-term access to this important scholarship, keeping this material accessible, and often immediately usable, far into the future.