FAQ: Creating DSpace Content: MIT Libraries

FAQ — Creating DSpace Content

The DSpace Federation maintains a website with a variety of information about the software. Questions about the software and its use worldwide are best answered via that community.

For information on getting content from MIT's DSpace, see Getting DSpace Content FAQ.

For other questions, please fill out the DSpace Help form.

Content and Copyright

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

See also Content Guidelines for DSpace at MIT.

Who can add content to DSpace?

Any MIT faculty member or researcher can add content to MIT's DSpace. Content must be added to a community that exists, or into a new community. Departments, Labs, Centers and other MIT units can also establish communities in DSpace. See What is a DSpace Community for more information.

How can I add content to DSpace?

See complete information at Getting Started: Options for MIT Faculty and Researchers.

If my lab wants to create DSpace content, 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. See Joining DSpace at MIT.

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.

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 When you distribute a previously unpublished work in DSpace, that work is immediately covered by copyright.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 managing your copyrights.

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.

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

See the MIT Libraries information about the crisis in scholarly communication and what faculty can do.

I'm an MIT alum. How can I get my thesis added to DSpace?

If you’re a recent MIT graduate and have access to the file that your paper thesis was printed from, you can convert this file to PDF and send it to the MIT Libraries to add to DSpace. See Add Your Thesis to MIT’s DSpace for more information.
You may also request that the MIT Libraries scan your thesis and add it to DSpace through the MIT Publications Order Form. Scanning of paper theses is completed on a cost recovery basis. The average cost for a 200 page thesis is $19, scanning takes 2-3 weeks. See the thesis pricing pages for more information. Thesis authors receive discounted MIT-only pricing when requesting a copy of their own thesis.

Preservation

Who supports DSpace at MIT?

The MIT Libraries support MIT's instance of DSpace. For help queries, fill out the DSpace Help form. See also the other FAQs.

How does DSpace preserve 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.

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.

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.

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."

Working within DSpace

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 full information under Community and Collections Policies.

See 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 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.

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.

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 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.