DSpace is an open source software package that provides the tools for management of digital assets, and is commonly used as the basis for institutional repositories. DSpace preserves and enables easy and open access to all types of digital content including text, images, moving images, mpegs and data sets.

This introductory DSpace webinar begins with a presentation from Bram Luyten of @mire.com, a DSpace support organisation. The short presentation covered the basics of DSpace and an overview of the newer and upcoming features. Bram showed screenshots of some well known repositories based on DSpace, such as the University of Cambridge in the UK, Harvard University in the USA, the World Bank's Open Knowledge repository, and the United Nations UNECA repository.

After this 30 minute presentation the session then moved into a Q&A session, based around a GoogleDoc on which was listed a series of questions posted in advance of the webinar by delegates.

Bram talked through answers he had prepared for these questions, while more were posted by delegates during the webinar itself. 

After the webinar, Bram spent some considerable time adding more information to the GoogleDoc, making sure every answer was as full as possible. You can read the questions raised by the delegates and Bram's answers to them here. 

Supporting materials

• Slides in PDF format of Bram Luyten's presentation.

Relevant links 

• DSpace homepage 
• DSpace software
• Open Access course materials (dl.psnc.pl/moodle/login/index.php)(in English) about using tools like DSpace for creating digital repositories in small institutions, prepared by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre in Poland (login as a guest).