Introduction to DSpace for Faculty

DSpace is a groundbreaking digital library system to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute all your scholarly research material in digital formats.

You can share your research findings quickly with a worldwide audience and preserve your materials in perpetuity.

What is 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.

What are some of the 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, as shown in this image:

  

• No more page charges for images. You can point to your images’ persistent identifiers in your published articles.

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.

Our online tutorial shows how easy it is to submit your content to DSpace.

Licensing and copyright issues

To add content to DSpace, you must have the copyright to the material, or have permission to submit work for which you do not have copyright. You should be willing and able to grant the university library the right to preserve and distribute the work in DSpace.

Many publishers offer a “self-archiving” clause in publication contracts, which allows you to archive a copy of your work. If your publisher doesn’t offer such a clause, you can negotiate to include one.

Each university sets its own licensing requirements for DSpace. Check with your DSpace team for information about your institution’s requirements.

Preserving your data for grants

DSpace provides a means to preserve and distribute data and research, as is required in many grants. Contact your institution’s grants office for details specific to your work.

Who’s working with DSpace now?

Among the universities building DSpace repositories are the following:

• Columbia University
• Cornell University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Ohio State University
• University of Cambridge
• University of Rochester
• University of Toronto
• University of Washington
• … and many other institutions all over the world

How can I get started?

Contact your university library to let them know you’re interested in adding your research to an institutional repository such as DSpace. The library’s director’s office or technology staff would develop a DSpace service for your institution.

The DSpace software platform is free of charge and open source, which means software engineers at many institutions develop and maintain the codebase. Our Technology section has all the details on downloading and installing the software.

Where can I learn more about DSpace?

Go to www.dspace.org to learn more about DSpace and how it’s used at other institutions. See the DSpace FAQ for answers to typical questions about DSpace.