This document provides a semi-technical overview of CGSpace, a digital repository managed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) that is used by nine CGIAR centers to store over 50,000 research items and receives around 250,000 hits per month. It discusses the history and use of DSpace at ILRI, how content is organized and described, strategies for search engine optimization and dissemination, and the technical skills required for maintenance and development.

1. A semi-technical overview of “CGSpace”
DSpace at ILRI
Alan Orth
June, 2015

2. History of DSpace at ILRI
● 2009: ILRI launches Mahider (“repository” in
Amharic)
● 2010: Other CGIAR centers and programs join
our platform and share hard / soft costs
● 2011: Rebranded as “CGSpace”
● 2015: 9 CGIAR centers, ~50,000 items, ~250k
hits/month

3. “CGSpace” in June, 2015

4. How we use DSpace
● Content people embedded in each department
help capture results (presentations, papers,
brochures, etc)
● Primary location for institutional outputs!
● No posting PDFs on corporate website!
● Integrate with website and blogs via RSS feeds
● Direct ALL traffic to DSpace!
● For data sets, videos, etc we make a metadata-
only accession with a link to eg YouTube

5. ● Communities, sub-communities, and collections
● Tempting to model after organization hierarchy!
● (we did)
● … but organization hierarchies change!
DSpace hierarchies

6. Mostly organized by output type now...

7. Metadata
● Standard Dublin Core is available
● No AGROVOC
● You can create custom controlled vocabularies in
arbitrary namespaces, eg: cg.subject.ilri

8. Custom metadata in ILRI report
Not AGROVOC!

9. “Discovery” facets
● Context-aware
metadata summaries
● Side effect: helps
spot metadata
inconsistencies!
● … Open Access,
Open access, open
Access, etc.

10. Search engine optimization (SEO)
Help Google Scholar consume your content!
● XML sitemaps
● Consistent domain name, eg: cgspace.cgiar.org
● Persistent links for resources
● Website speed and HTTPS both a plus
● Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools to submit
sitemap, control indexing, see stats, etc

11. Sitemap view in Google Webmaster Tools

12. Importance of persistent links
● Website addresses change…
● mahider.ilri.org -> cgspace.cgiar.org
● But resources stay the same!
http://hdl.handle.net/10568/67073
● “Handle” service from handle.net
● Everything under prefix 10568 is CGSpace
● Default DSpace handle prefix is 123456789!

13. dc.identifier.uri specifies an item’s persistent universal resource identifier (URI)

14. Getting data INTO DSpace
● Day-to-day submission is manual, by a small
army of editors
● One-time batch uploads of items from other
systems in CSV format (InMagic!)
● OAI-PMH for metadata only
● OAI-ORE for metadata + bitstreams (eg, from
another DSpace or Sharepoint, etc)
● SWORD (haven't tried)
● REST API (DSpace 5+, haven't tried)

15. Getting data OUT OF DSpace
● REST API for structured JSON or XML
● OAI-PMH for metadata
● OAI-ORE for metadata + bitstreams (PDFs, etc)
● RSS feeds for websites / blogs
● XML sitemaps for search engines*
*Google discontinued the use of OAI for discovering
site content in 2008! http:
//googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.
com/2008/04/retiring-support-for-oai-pmh-in.html

16. CCAFS website, driven by Drupal + DSpace APIs

17. “Latest outputs” on project blog populated via RSS, links to CGSpace

18. Open source workflow on GitHub
https://github.com/ilri/DSpace

19. Skills needed in your organization
Besides content people(!)...
● Prioritize Linux systems administration
experience (Tomcat, httpd, PostgreSQL, DNS,
SSH, git)
● General: computer science background
● Web developers a diverse bunch...
● Java development experience doesn't hurt

20. Extra considerations
● Item mapping
● Maintenance tasks (background batch jobs)
● Backups of assetstore and PostgreSQL!
● Altmetrics tracks social media mentions
● Separate production / development
environments
● CGSpace server is $80/month
● ~20GB of PDFs, ~8GB of Solr data

21. Getting help
● “DSpace Tech” mailing list
● “dspace” tag on StackOverflow website
● a.orth@cgiar.org