[3] The first public version of DSpace was released in November 2002, as a joint effort between developers from MIT and HP Labs.

Currently the DSpace software and user community receives leadership and guidance from LYRASIS.

DSpace is constructed with Java web applications, many programs, and an associated metadata store.

The web applications provide interfaces for administration, deposit, ingest, search, and access.

More recent versions of DSpace also support faceted search and browse functionality using Apache Solr.