Librarians and Teaching Organizations are all feeling the need for an institutionally based multidisciplinary repository that can help them preserve their Digital Content for the future.

Before choosing an Institutional Repository Software there are certain factors that needs to be considered. Some of these factors are as follows:

a. Metadata Scheme - Should be widely accepted
b. Easily discoverable content - Indexing both the metadata and text
c. Long Term preservation of Content
d. Host all types of Digital Content
e. Follows Standards
f. Completely Customizable
g. Highly Scalable and Robust

The top 10 reasons to choose DSpace is as follow:

1. Open source- Released under the terms of the BSD Open Source License. Freely available for organizations, institutions and individuals to use.

2. Ease of Use - Dspace helps Librarians easily preserve, index and distribute content over a Web based system.

3. Uses the Dublin Core Metadata scheme - A Widely accepted metadata scheme for describing articles / items intellectually. Dspace also is configurable to use hierarchial metadata schemas such as MARC21, MODS.

4. Ease in retrieving documents far into the future - Uses the CNRI handle system as the persistent identifier that helps documents be easily retrieved.

5. Manages all types of Digital Content - Dspace can easily recognize and manage a large number of file formats and mime types. Formats supported by Dspace are JPEG, MPEG, TIFF files

6. Granular Access permissions - DSpace provides a role based access permissions and hence it is easy to tackle the complex problem of how to accomodate the different submission Workflows.

7. Fully Customizable System - Dspace architecture is a straightforward three-layer architecture that easily allows for future customization and enhancement.

8. Supports Interoperability with other Digital Repositories - Supports the OAI-PMH and has used OCLC OAIC to accomplish this.

9. Cross-OS Installation - DSpace can be installed out of the box for both, Linux as well as Windows Environment

10. Vibrant Community of Developers, Librarians and Academicians - Dspace is supported by a community of more than 700 organizations and also looked after by the DSpace Foundation.

DSpace is one of the fastest growing Institutional Repositories in the world and is the leading choice among all the Digital Repositories currently available in the market.