FAQ for MIT Faculty and Researchers

What is DSpace?
How does it work?
What is a DSpace Community?
What kind of content can I add to DSpace?
Who else at MIT is using DSpace?
Which other universities are running DSpace?
Where can I find information on Digital Preservation?
Where can I learn more about copyright and intellectual property rights?
What copyright do I own?
What is the Creative Commons License?
What is a Deposit License in DSpace?
Do I retain the copyright to my work in DSpace?
What is metadata?
If my lab wants to create a DSpace Community, do we have to download the DSpace software?
How is DSpace different from other digital repositories?
What sort of persistent identifiers does DSpace use?
How will DSpace preserve my digital material?

What is DSpace?

DSpace is a groundbreaking digital repository system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes your digital research material.

How does it work?

DSpace manages and distributes digital items, made up of digital files (or “bitstreams”), and allows you to create, index, and search associated metadata to locate and retrieve the items. It's designed to support the long-term preservation of the digital material stored in the repository. DSpace is also designed to make submission easy: DSpace Communities (such as departments, labs, and centers) can customize the system to meet their individual needs and manage the submission process themselves.

What is a DSpace Community?

A DSpace Community is an administrative unit at MIT that produces research, has a defined leader, has long-term stability, and can assume responsibility for setting Community policies. Each community must be able to assign a coordinator who can work with DSpace staff. See http://web.mit.edu/research.html for a list of research entities at MIT. Groups wishing to establish a DSpace Community that do not fall into this definition will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Each Community can contain one or more collections. Communities can also contain sub-communities, which in turn house collections. This diagram shows how DSpace Communities and collections are organized.

What kind of content can I add to DSpace?

DSpace accepts all manner of digital formats. Here are some examples:

• Documents, such as articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, or conference papers
• Books
• Theses
• Data sets
• Computer programs
• Visualizations, simulations, and other models
• Multimedia publications
• Books
• Bibliographic datasets
• Images
• Audio files
• Video files
• Learning objects
• Web pages

Who else at MIT is using DSpace?

Dozens of MIT faculty, researchers, departments, labs, and centers have already joined DSpace. These are the current DSpace communities at MIT: https://dspace.mit.edu/. Many others are in production and will launch soon. Also, meet MIT faculty members who are already using DSpace.

Which other universities are running DSpace?

See this list of institutions around the world that use DSpace to preserve their digital research.

Where can I find information on Digital Preservation?

There are several good resources available. Start by reading Paul Wheatley's article "A way forward for developments in the digital preservation functions of DSpace : options, issues and recommendations."

Where can I learn more about copyright and intellectual property rights?

See the MIT Libraries information about the crisis in scholarly communication and advice for faculty and researchers.

What copyright do I own?

All work set down in a tangible form is automatically protected by U.S. copyright law. The MIT Libraries offers extensive online resources about copyright for faculty and staff. When you distribute a previously unpublished work in DSpace, that work is immediately covered by copyright. Copyright restricts the use of works by others unless the user explicitly asks for permission to use your content.

However, if you would like to make your work more accessible, DSpace gives you other license options to release some of the restrictions of the copyright law. (See Creative Commons licenses below.)

If your work has previously been published, you may no longer hold the copyright to your work and may therefore have limited options regarding electronic distribution of that work. Publishers’ policies differ on this point. Some publishers do allow re-distribution via digital repositories. See the MIT Libraries’ web page for suggestions on how to manage your copyrights.

What is the Creative Commons License?

Creative Commons is a group founded by lawyers in academia that has defined alternative licenses whereby you can release some of the rights you are automatically assigned by copyright law. The most open license is the Attribution license. With this you receive the greatest exposure for your work, since it allows your work to be distributed anywhere or modified to someone's specific needs, while still giving you credit for its creation. Other Creative Commons license choices specify whether you allow commercial use of the work, whether you allow modifications of the work, and whether you allow derivative works to be created based on your work.

There's a Creative Commons form built into DSpace that allows you to identify the license to be used with the item you are submitting, so people can know what they're allowed to do with your work. This form is optional in DSpace, and you can skip it if you wish to retain your full copyright.

What is a Deposit License in DSpace?

When you submit content to DSpace, you click through a Deposit License. This is a contract between you and MIT, allowing MIT to distribute and preserve your work. No copyright transfer is involved.

See the text of the license for more information.

Do I retain the copyright to my work in DSpace?

Yes, DSpace does not require you to give your copyright, as some publishers do. We only require that you agree to the DSpace Deposit License.

What is metadata?

The term metadata means “data about data.” Authors and librarians use metadata to tag content for organization and retrieval. DSpace currently uses a qualified version of the Dublin Core schema.

For an introduction to metadata, see the Getty Research Institute's Introduction to Metadata, available at www.getty.edu/research/institute/standards/intrometadata/index.html.

If my lab wants to create a DSpace Community, do we have to download the DSpace software?

No, the MIT Libraries run and maintain the DSpace servers for all MIT Communities. MIT faculty, researchers, departments, labs, and centers do not have to download or run DSpace on their servers. You use a web-based submission and search interface to access DSpace.

How is DSpace different from other digital repositories?

Unlike many other repositories, DSpace addresses the myriad issues inherent in a multi-disciplinary archive, including:

• Differing policies, practices, and cultures in individual disciplines
• Variety of digital formats produced in today’s multi-media research environments
• Digital preservation
• Complexity of metadata standards needed to accommodate and maintain access to the digital formats supported by the system

DSpace has a flexible storage and retrieval architecture adaptable to multiple data formats and distinct research disciplines. Each content community has a customized user portal that promotes a user environment closely matching that community’s practices and terminology.

What sort of persistent identifiers does DSpace use?

DSpace uses the Handle System from CNRI to assign and resolve persistent identifiers for each and every digital item. Handles are URN-compliant identifiers, and the Handle resolver is an open-source system which is used in conjunction with the DSpace system.

Handles were chosen in preference to persistent URLs because of the desire to support citations to items in DSpace over very long time spans – longer than we believe the HTTP protocol will last. Handles in DSpace are currently implemented as URLs, but can also be modified to work with future protocols.

How will DSpace preserve my digital material?

DSpace identifies two levels of digital preservation: bit preservation, and functional preservation. Bit preservation ensures that a file remains exactly the same over time – not a single bit is changed – while the physical media evolve around it. Functional preservation goes further: the file does change over time so that the material continues to be immediately usable in the same way it was originally while the digital formats (and the physical media) evolve over time. Some file formats can be functionally preserved using straightforward format migration (e.g., TIFF images or XML documents). Other formats are proprietary, or for other reasons are much harder to preserve functionally.

At MIT, for the time being, we acknowledge the fact we cannot predict or control the formats in which faculty and researchers create their research materials. Faculty use the tools that are best for their purposes, and we will get whatever formats those tools produce. Because of this we’ve defined three levels of preservation for a given format: supported, known, or unsupported. Supported formats will be functionally preserved using either format migration or emulation techniques. Known formats are those that we can’t promise to preserve (e.g., proprietary or binary formats) but which are so popular that we believe third party migration tools will emerge to help with format migration. Finally, unsupported formats are those that we don’t know enough about to do any sort of functional preservation. For all three level we will do bit-level preservation so that “digital archaeologists” of the future will have the raw material to work with if the material proves to be worth that effort.

We are also collaborating with partner institutions (particularly Cambridge University in the UK) to develop new upload procedures for converting unsupported or known formats to supported ones where advisable, and to enhance DSpace’s ability to capture preservation metadata and to perform periodic format migrations.