DSpace: A Year in the Life of an Open Source Digital Repository System

Abstract

The DSpace™ digital repository system was released as open source software in November of 2002. In the year since then it has been adopted by a large number of research universities and other organizations world-wide that need a digital repository solution for a number of content types: research articles, gray literature, e-theses, cultural materials, scientific datasets, institutional records, educational materials, and more. The DSpace platform and its various applications are becoming better understood with experience and time. As one result of a recent meeting of the DSpace user community, we are now venturing into the territory of broad, community-based open source development and management, and gaining insights from the experience of the Apache Foundation, Global Grid Forum, and other successful open source projects about how to build open source software for the digital library domain.