QSpace Glossary
Digital Repository
“A digital repository is a mechanism for managing and storing digital content. Repositories can be subject or institutional in their focus. Putting content into an institutional repository enables staff and institutions to manage and preserve it, and therefore derive maximum value from it. A repository can support research, learning, and administrative processes. Repositories use open standards to ensure that the content they contain is accessible in that it can be searched and retrieved for later use. The use of these agreed international standards allows mechanisms to be set up which import, export, identify, store and retrieve the digital content within the repository.”
- http://www.rsp.ac.uk/start/before-you-start/what-is-a-repository/
DSpace
“A groundbreaking digital repository system, DSpace captures, stores, indexes, preserves and redistributes an organization's research material in digital formats. Research institutions worldwide use DSpace for a variety of digital archiving needs - from institutional repositories (IRs) to learning object repositories or electronic records management, and more. DSpace is freely available as open source software you can customize and extend. An active community of developers, researchers and users worldwide contribute their expertise to the DSpace Community.”
- https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/EndUserFaq#EndUserFaq-WhatisDSpace?
Metadata
“Metadata is literally "data about data." It is descriptive information used for querying. Some metadata can be done mechanically, such as file sizes, checksums, and full-text indexing, for instance. Other metadata is a higher order of human-made description such as titles, authors, unique identifiers, and abstracts. DSpace uses a qualified version of Dublin Core metadata across all content. Some communities or collections may also have tailored metadata available (such as MARC records for book collections, or FGDC records for geographic datasets). But even where that's available for some items, we crosswalk more detailed metadata records into our Dublin Core vocabulary to ensure a common layer of descriptive specificity for browsing and searching across everything.”
- https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/EndUserFaq#EndUserFaq-WhatisMetadata?
QSpace Community
QSpace content is organized around Communities which can correspond to entities such as colleges, publications, and research centers. Within each community there can be an unlimited number of Sub-Communities and an unlimited number of collections. Each collection may contain an unlimited number of items. This organization gives QSpace the flexibility to accommodate differing needs of communities by allowing them to
- Decide on policies such as:
- - who contributes content
- - whether there will be a review process
- - who will have access. - Determine workflow - reviewing, editing, metadata.
- Manage collections.
QSpace Collection
Communities can maintain an unlimited number of Collections in QSpace. Collections can be organized around a topic, or by type of information (such as working papers or datasets) or by any other sorting method a community finds useful in organizing its digital items. Collections can have different policies and workflows.
Deposit License
Specifies the rights the submitter grants to the hosting institution, Qatar University.
Creative Commons Distribution License
Creative Commons is an organization that provides copyright licenses for sharing creative work. A Creative Commons license gives you flexibility (for example, you can choose to allow only non-commercial uses) and protects the people who use your work, so they don’t have to worry about copyright infringement, as long as they abide by the conditions you have specified.
Therefore its role is only to define basic redistribution rights that the copyright owner allows to others. You CANNOT customize these licenses as they are defined by Creative Commons.
- https://creativecommons.org/about
Open Access
Open access means unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. QSpace is an open access digital repository.