Using DSpace as a Disciplinary Data Repository

Abstract

Dryad (http://datadryad.org) is a disciplinary repository for datasets underlying published works in biology. Dryad allows investigators to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, and repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors. Dryad partners with a coalition of scientific societies and journals to encourage deposition of data and to facilitate automatic metadata collection.

DSpace fits many of Dryad's needs, but the needs of a disciplinary repository and the needs of a data repository impose constraints not met by off-the-shelf DSpace functionality. These constraints affect both repository organization and features. For example, the community/collection boundaries native to DSpace conflict with the overlapping concerns of biology sub-disciplines, so the communities and collections have been hidden from users. Because the step-by-step DSpace submission process does not accommodate the workflow required to store data associated with publications, a completely new submission system has been implemented. To meet the needs of its user community, Dryad must integrate with other repositories and services. Dryad is developing functionality to search harvested content from specialized repositories, to link between Dryad content and external content, and to facilitate submission of Dryad content to specialized repositories.

This presentation details the differences between the needs of Dryad and a general institutional repository, and describes the modifications made to DSpace to accommodate those differences.