The document discusses the current challenges facing PMU's Dspace digital repository project. It provides background on Dspace as an open-source digital repository software and institutional repositories more broadly. Some key challenges discussed are interoperability, metadata standards, content types and formats, software maintenance, management policies around access, submissions and preservation, and encouraging faculty participation and updating content over time. Developing countries like Saudi Arabia also face challenges in making academic research widely accessible through open access repositories.

1. Current Challenges for Dspace: PMU Digital
Repository Project
Dr. Mohammed A. Abdulla
Deanship of Graduate Studies and Research

2. • Today, higher education institutions are adopting the model of a learning
organization. That is: an intelligent organization, an organization that
manages knowledge.
• The Deanship of Graduate Studies and Research seeks to improve the
research environment of the PMU community.
• This includes providing necessary tools to help Faculty members and
researchers.
• Dspace is an important tool "to promote the scientific production of PMU by
the appropriate means.” It can host the full text of the scientific and academic
output of PMU faculty members and researchers, as well as graduate
student projects.
• We have established an institutional repository for PMU using Dspace
software.
About this project:

3. •Dspace is open-source software for Digital Object management.
•Dspace is an open-source repository application that allows users to capture,
store, index, preserve and distribute their digital material, including text, video,
audio and data. (DURASPACE, 2018)
•Dspace provides a way to manage materials and publications in a
professionally maintained repository to give them greater visibility and
accessibility over time.
•Dspace is most often used as an institutional repository -- a platform that
provides access to research output, scholarly publications, library collections,
and more.
What is Dspace ?

4. What is a Digital Repository?
•A mechanism capable of storing, describing, preserving, managing and
distributing any kind of digital material.
•A digital repository is where digital content and assets are stored and can
be searched and retrieved for later use.
•Collections of digital objects, such as documents or photographs, are
organized and typically made available through a web interface.
Source: https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=25467341

5. What can Dspace be used for?
DSpace can be used to store any type of digital materials, including:
Documents, such as articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports,
conference papers; Books; Theses; Data sets; Computer programs;
Visualizations, simulations, and other models; Multimedia publications,
Administrative records; Published books; Overlay journals; Bibliographic
datasets; Images; Audio files; Video files; e-formatted digital library
collections; Learning objects; Web pages

6. What are the benefits of using Dspace?
•Facilitates the capture and ingest of materials, including metadata about the
materials
•Facilitates easy access to the materials, by both listing and searching
•Facilitates the long-term preservation of the materials
•Increase visibility and raises profile of institution
•Possible cost reduction of scholarly published journals
•Certain benefits for authors to submit their intellectual work into repositories
Source: https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=25467341

7. Dspace allows you to:
•Organize, describe and store your content easily through the built-in structure
•Archive and distribute material you would currently put on your personal website
•Get your materials out, quickly, to a worldwide audience through exposure to search
engines such as Google
•Have a persistent network identifier for your work, which never changes or breaks
Additionally, Dspace allows institutional repositories to:
•Preserve reusable teaching materials that you can use with course management
systems
•Store examples of students’ projects (with the students’ permission)
•Showcase students’ theses (again with permission)
•Keep track of your own publications/bibliography

8. TECHNICAL ISSUES/ CHALLENGES:
•Interoperability: Important for a repository to provide access to users outside the
university
•Metadata: Metadata describes the nature of the digital data that is stored in the
repository, and also describes the contents, structure and access of this data
•Document Formats and Types: A very important element of the repository is the
document type, in other words, what sort of document will be accepted and in which
format
•Software: Some of the open-source software products available include: Dspace,
GNU Eprints, and Fedora. Commercial options also exist, such as BioMed Central.
But open-source software is the best option, as it is free.

9. ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUES AND CHALLENGES :
• Management Policy: Before a repository is established, a number of decisions should be
taken into consideration. These decisions include systems architecture, content, and scope
and purposes of the repository, which should be defined by policy.
A. Access levels & legal aspects, including copyright and ownership of the material
submitted
B. Standards, including metadata, formats and document types
C. Sustainability and long-term archiving and preservation
D. Funding available to maintain the repository.
• Submission: In order to establish how the repository will be managed, it is important to
have administrative guidelines regarding the submission of material into the repository.
Repositories do this by using a workflow to indicate the necessary steps to achieve it.

10. The basic three component steps of a repository submission workflow are:
A. Capture of metadata
B. File management
C. License handling
Source: DIGITAL REPOSITORIES: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES ,A LITERATURE REVIEW PREPARED BY ANA LUARTE RMIT , 2006
Add metadata Manage files Specify license
Example of simple three-stage submission workflow

11. Growth of the OpenDOAR Database – Saudi Arabia

12. Usage of Open Access Repository Software – Saudi Arabia

13. Content Types in OpenDOAR Repositories – Saudi Arabia

14. Registered Repositories in Saudi Arabia

15. Repositories in Saudi Arabia
Institutions Repository Name Items URL
King Abdulaziz University The Digital repository of Information Science Department 152
https://libraries.kau.edu.sa/Content.aspx?Site_ID
=12510&lng=EN&cid=221825
KAUST
(King Abdulla University of Science and Technology)
KAUST Digital Archive 18,574 http://repository.kaust.edu.sa/kaust/
KFUPM (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals) KFUPM ePrints 5,750 http://eprints.kfupm.edu.sa/
King Saud University ‫المخطوطات‬ (makhtota) 2,808 http://makhtota.ksu.edu.sa/
King Saud University King Saud University Repository 13,948 http://library.ksu.edu.sa/en
Naif Arab University for Security Sciences
Institutional Digital Repository for Naif Arab University for Security
Sciences
13,072
https://repository.nauss.edu.sa/handle/1234567
89/53565
Najran University Najran University's Repository 2,387 https://repository.nu.edu.sa/
Taibah University Taibah University Digital Repository 6,553 http://repository.taibahu.edu.sa/en/
Umm Al-Qura University Umm Al-Qura University Reference Repository http://eref.uqu.edu.sa/
Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (University of
Dammam)
Institutional Repository (IR) of the university’s theses, dissertations
and research publications
6,563 http://repository.iau.edu.sa/
Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University PMU Research Repository 499 http://research.pmu.edu.sa:8080/jspui/mydspace
Publication data obtained from OpenDOAR October 22, 2018

16. How to register with PMU Dspace Digital Repositories:
Login information:
Link: http://research.pmu.edu.sa:8080/jspui/password-login

17. PMU Dspace Digital Repositories Content
Link: http://research.pmu.edu.sa:8080/jspui/password-login

18. PMU Digital Repository (Challenges):
 Initial questions that arose: Who should manage, or govern, this Digital
Repository that offered the possibility of sharing PMU faculty research output
with the public? What kind of service and support would be received from PMU?
 Unfortunately, academic and research institutions in developing countries are
still struggling to overcome many challenging issues in an attempt to make their
research outputs openly accessible through open-access institutional
repositories.
Are PMU faculty members more likely to use an institutional repository?
One of the challenges for any repository of learning and teaching materials is
the management of version control, due to the very significant driver of changing
knowledge practices. (Digital Repositories infoKit)
 Updating content: Persuading and supporting academics to submit content to
the repository is one of the most significant challenges a repository manager will
face.