Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. OER could be in the form of any file format (images, videos, text documents, rich text documents, audio files, etc.), and as of now there is no universally accepted standard(s) for OER creation. The author creating an OER should specify an appropriate copyleft license. Some of the well known open content licenses available are Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), Public Domain Dedication (CC0), GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), Free Art License (FAL), etc. Digital libraries have metadata for easy retrieval, and management of information resource. Metadata can describe resources at any level of composition and aggregation. It can describe a collection, a single resource, or a component of a larger resource (for example, a chapter in a book). Standards for metadata in digital libraries include Dublin Core, METS, MODS, DDI, DOI, URN, PREMIS schema, EML, and OAI-PMH.
A system to be built should be able to use any metadata standards for defining OERs. One such system is DSpace.
DSpace is an open source repository software package typically used for creating open access repositories for published digital content. While DSpace shares some feature overlap with content management systems and document management systems, the DSpace repository software serves a specific need as a digital archives system, focused on the long-term storage, access and preservation of digital content. The first public version of DSpace was released in 2002 as a joint effort between developers from MIT and HP Labs.
At the architecture level, DSpace is a set of cooperating Java web applications and utility programs that maintain an asset store and an associated metadata store. The web applications provide interfaces for administration, deposit, ingest, search and access. The asset store is maintained on a file system or similar storage system. The metadata, including access and configuration information, is stored in a relational database and supports the use of PostgreSQL and Oracle database.
The entire platform for the Open Educational Resources is built on DSpace.