An Overview

Prosentient Systems has extensive experience in implementing both small and large DSpace sites. We can also provide technical training for systems librarians. 

DSpace is an open source digital repository for the management of digital assets. Typically, DSpace is used as an institutional repository by organisations that create or hold a large number of digital assets, such as universities, laboratories, libraries and archives. 

DSpace is also intended as a platform for digital preservation activities. It supports long-term persistent identifiers for content that never change or break and the development roadmap foresees features to manage the technological obsolescence of data formats over time. DSpace is written in Java and is scalable and portable across different operating system platforms. An item of digital content in DSpace parlance is called a "bitstream".  Reflecting its origins among research institutions, bitstreams and their associated metadata are assigned to "collections" in the repository, and collections are owned by "communities".  The content is indexed by DSpace so that it can be searched for, retrieved and displayed over the web. 

Have a look at our gallery of example projects.

The first public version of DSpace was released in 2002, as a joint effort between developers from a consortium of university libraries, including the MIT and HP Labs, which still actively support it.

Prosentient Systems can:

  • Provide a web-enabled server to run DSpace on 
  • Install and configure the application 
  • Migrate any existing data: Ww have tools that will do a bulk import of files in a directory, making use of the filename and the contents of any associated metadata files. We are happy to provide you with these tools if you able to configure and run them yourselves, or we can do the migration for you. 
  • Train staff
  • Source the technical skills to support and update the software 
  • Provide your own branded instance of DSpace with the default workflow and metadata schema, shared data link, ongoing upgrades, bug fixes and email support 
  • Provide extra tools, know-how and our vast integration expertise. For example, an integration of DSpace and Koha to provide a unified catalogue of all items in the library, physical and electronic, or an extension to export DSpace search results to EndNote. 
  • Provide many other more complex library operations

The benefits of DSpace include: 

  • A well structured and layered design
  • A simple user experience 
  • A fast, low cost and simple implementation
  • A configurable workflow for submissions to the repository
  • A robust archiving and discovery platform
  • An open access design
  • The integration of tools
  • It is highly customisable

In addition to the standard DSpace features, Prosentient systems has taken DSpace further,  for example by providing  integration with the Koha open source Library Management System in order to provide a unified catalogue of electronic and other library resources.