IUScholarWorks Technical Overview

Randall FloydDigital Library Program

Programmer/Database Administrator

Questions:

• What is DSpace?• Why DSpace? • What technology does DSpace use?

• How does DSpace use metadata?

Other Interesting Things

• Customizations• Challenges

Terminology

• DSpace, IUScholarWorks, Institutional Repository, Open Access …

Terminology

• DSpace, IUScholarWorks, Institutional Repository, Open Access …

• IUScholarWorks

Terminology

• DSpace, IUScholarWorks, Institutional Repository, Open Access …

• IUScholarWorks is an Open Access

Terminology

• DSpace, IUScholarWorks, Institutional Repository, Open Access …

• IUScholarWorks is an Open Access Institutional Repository

Terminology

• DSpace, IUScholarWorks, Institutional Repository, Open Access …

• IUScholarWorks is an Open Access Institutional Repository built on DSpace

What is DSpace?

According to DSpace marketing:

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

What is DSpace?

• DSpace is freely available open source software jointly developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs as a solution for creating various kinds of digital repositories

Why DSpace?• Other competing solutions: EPrints, ProQuest's Digital Commons@

• Performed full evaluation of solutions

• Important Criteria– Features– Ownership/support: local vs. service provider

– Technology– Cost is always a factor

Why DSpace?• Choice also influenced by current DLP infrastructure initiatives

• Hard choice since DSpace was just emerging and "rough around the edges"

• Eventually you have to get started --sometimes you just have to choose something, even if it isn't perfect

That's our story and we're stuck with it

-- Stanley Laurel

What technology does DSpace use?

• It is a Java web application– Java servlets in an application server– Java Server Pages render the interfaces– Look and feel from Cascading Style Sheets

• Metadata is stored in a relational database– PostgreSQL by default, Oracle also supported

What technology does DSpace use?

• The document objects are stored as "bitstreams" on disk

• Persistent identifiers to items are provided by CNRI Handle system– http://hdl.handle.net/2022/131

• Searchable indexes– Apache Lucene text search engine– indexes both metadata and document text

How does DSpace use metadata?

• Based on Dublin Core • Submitters fill out forms with fields representing Dublin Core elements

• Fully customizable through the Dublin Core Registry

• Searchable via basic and advanced search controls

How does DSpace use metadata?

• Dublin Core Metadata available via OAI-PMH server– Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

• Can be indexed and searched by Google– in normal fashion by crawling communities and browse pages

– via Google Scholar and OAI-PMH server

Other Interesting Things

• Customizations• Challenges

Customizations• Interface and Branding

– Top and side "news" bars maintained through the administrative interface

– Labels and textual elements are customizable via a single file

– Minor style sheet changes to affect overall appearance

• Submission Process– Form labels and target elements configurable via XML configuration file

Customizations

• IU CAS Authentication– No need to maintain separate user accounts and passwords

– Transparently adds IU user to DSpace when accessing for the first time

Researcher Pages• Is a DSpace add-on developed by University of Rochester

• UR discovered that communities wanted IR to be more people-centric– DSpace is content-centric

• Creates "cookie-cutter" mini web pages about authors

• Authors can link to both internal DSpace items and external URLs

• Example Researcher Page at University of Rochester

Challenges• Customizations difficult to merge into base code when upgrading

• Convergence with DLP infrastructure project

• Metadata issues– Need to get it as right as possible the first time

– Diverse content makes metadata planning hard– A "one size fits all" approach may not describe any one type of content very robustly

– Must be reusable when/if moved to a different system

Discussion

Resources

• IUScholarWorks– http://scholarworks.iu.edu

• DSpace– http://www.dspace.org

• Scholarly Communication– http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=3562

– http://www.library.arizona.edu/services/faculty/scholcom/resources.html