Researchers create research outputs, such as books, articles, or conference proceedings, that can be submitted to Esploro's repository. Affiliated researchers are researchers who are currently affiliated with the institution. Non-affiliated researchers are researchers who are external to the institution but have collaborated or co-authored outputs with one or more affiliated researchers.

Researchers can submit outputs as research assets (or just assets) using a dedicated deposit interface. Alternately, research librarians (administrators) can submit them on behalf of the researcher using the Esploro administrator user interface (admin UI). While assets are in the process of submission (before they are approved), the assets are known as research deposits (or just deposits). When an administrator submits an asset on behalf of a researcher, the deposit is called a staff-mediated research deposit.

Esploro also uses an automated processes to capture research outputs deposited to other repositories. Esploro identifies these outputs as published by the faculty, captures the metadata associated with them, and adds them to the repository, thus reducing the workload on administrators and faculty. These assets are known as imported assets.

The researcher who made the deposit, or for whom an administrator made the deposit, is the asset owner. The owner and other researchers who are authors of the asset are called creators. Any other people or organizations associated with the creation of the asset are called contributors.

In Esploro, assets include research asset metadata (or just metadata), which contains information about the asset, and optionally contain the digital files that hold the actual research output (or links to them). The metadata includes access rights, license information, asset description, and so forth.

Assets are associated with researchers, as well as with specific departments in the institution, called research organization units (or just organization units). Example units might be the institution, a specific school, department, faculty, or group.

Assets can be associated with other assets using relationships. For example, one asset may be derived from another asset, or be the source code to another asset.

Each researcher, organization unit, asset, and deposit can also be associated with specific areas of research, or research topics. A large list of research topics are predefined, but you can add your own when submitting or editing an asset. Areas of research that you add are called subjects. For the Australia/New Zealand region, you can ask Ex Libris to enable ANZ research topics (fields of research and socio-economic objectives) in place of the default topics.

A grant is money or other funding provided by an organization to assist in creating an asset. A researcher who is awarded a grant is known as an investigator. Assets or investigators can be associated with multiple grants, and grants can be associated with multiple assets or investigators. A grant is associated with a single organization, but an organization can be associated with multiple grants. Esploro enables you to manage information about grants and associate grants with assets and/or researchers, mostly for reporting purposes in Esploro Analytics.

By default, deposits are not immediately publicly available in Esploro. These assets are in Submitted status when not assigned to an administrator, or Under Review otherwise. Esploro creates a task for each deposit on behalf of the institute. Deposits can be assigned to a specific administrator to work on. The administrator evaluates the deposit, communicates with the researcher and adds or corrects information to the deposit, as required, before approving the deposit. Alternately, the administrator can return the deposit for more information or corrections (in which case the researchers can resubmit the deposit) or delete the deposit. Once approved, the task is removed and the asset becomes a public part of the repository. If a deposit is deleted, the asset is removed from Esploro. Note that the administrator can continue to limit access to the asset in various ways.