DSpace
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DSpace is an open source software package which provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly used as the basis for an institutional repository. It is also intended as a platform for Digital preservation activities. Since its release in 2002, as a product of the HP-MIT Alliance, it has been installed and is in production at over 100 institutions around the globe [1], from large universities to small higher education colleges and research centres. It is shared under a BSD licence.
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[edit] History
The first version of DSpace was released in November 2002, following a joint effort by developers from MIT and HP Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In March 2004 the first DSpace User Group Meeting (DSUG) took place at Hotel@MIT, and it was there that the first discussions concerning the DSpace community and its future governance were discussed in earnest. The DSpace Federation formed a loose grouping of interested institutions, while the DSpace Committers group (see Community Development Model below) was formed shortly after, consisting of five developers from HP Labs, MIT, OCLC, University of Cambridge, and University of Edinburgh. Later two further developers from Australian National University and Texas A & M University also joined this group. DSpace 1.3 was released in 2005, and at around the same time the second DSpace User Group Meeting was held at the University of Cambridge. Following this, two further smaller user group meetings were spawned, the first in January/February 2006 in Sydney, and the second in April 2006 in Bergen, Norway. Most recently version 1.4 was released in July 2006.
[edit] Community Development Model
The DSpace community has attempted to base its formal structure along the same lines as the Apache Foundation community development model. That is, there is a user-base, within which is contained a subset of developers, some of whom are contributors to the core codebase. The developments by these contributors are then added to the distribution under the curation of a core team of committers, whose job is to ensure that the code meets the various guidelines laid out in the developer documentation, and that it contributes effectively to the direction of DSpace development (which should be/is decided by the community as a whole). The community is serviced technologically by a development base at SourceForge, and a number of mailing lists for technical queries and development discussion, as well as a general list for non-technical community members.
Membership of the community is implied by being interested and involved - there are no formal membership fees or lists.
[edit] Technology
DSpace is written in Java and JSP, using the Java Servlet Framework. It uses a relational database, and supports the use of PostgreSQL and Oracle. It makes its holdings available primarily via a web interface, but it also supports the OAI-PMH v2.0, and is capable of exporting METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) packages also. Future versions are likely to see increasing use of web services, and changes to the User Interface layer.
[edit] Alternatives
Similar open source products are Greenstone, Fedora and GNU EPrints.
