2024 DSpace North American User Group Meeting

Registration and Breakfast (provided)

Check-in and enjoy coffee and refreshments

Welcome! Opening Remarks and Logistics

Welcome to the University of Minnesota and to the DSpace North American User Group

Introduction to DSpace and Group Q&A

Presenters: Tim Donohue and Holger Lenz (Lyrasis)

Tim Donohue, DSpace Technical Lead, and Holger Lenz, DSpace Coordinator, at Lyrasis will introduce the recently released DSpace 8 and talk about the community's involvement in its production. This will be an opportunity for attendees to ask their own questions and learn more about the version. 

Slides: https://tinyurl.com/2b2jxujf

Break / Networking

Innovative features in DSpace 8: 4Science Mini Workshop (https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/dspace-8-features-and-dspace-9-10-preview/272015520)

Presenters: Federico Verlicchi, Andrea Bollini, Susanna Mornati, and Irene Buso (4Science)

This presentation will provide an overview on all innovative features recently introduced in DSpace by 4Science, particularly for version 8, including a glance at what will happen with version 9, due in spring 2025. Main topics will cover:

• Data Correction
• Publication Claim
• COAR Notify Protocol
• ORCID Improvements
• ROR Integration

11:30 - 12:00

Group Discussion: What new features are you using in DSpace?

Small group discussion to meet other attendees and discuss what new features in DSpace 7 & 8 you've implemented. 

12:00 - 1:00

Lunch (Provided)

1:00 - 1:30

Open Research Infrastructure for DSpace Users

Presenter: Bridget Almas (Lyrasis)

Bridget Almas, Director of Community Supported Technologies at Lyrasis, will provide an overview of open research infrastructure components/programs designed to support open repository content, open science, and FAIR principles as part of the wider open research and scholarly communication ecosystem. Topics include:

• IRUS: Institutional Repository Usage Statistics

• DataCite & DSpace

• ORCID & DSpace

1:30 - 3:30

Contributing to the DSpace Community

Presenter: Tim Donohue and Holger Lenz (Lyrasis)

Tim Donohue, DSpace Technical Lead, and Holger Lenz, DSpace Coordinator at Lyrasis, will lead a session on contributing to the community, including how to:

• Join ongoing / weekly meetings
• Review & update documentation
• Contribute to DSpace support
• Create bug tickets on GitHub
• Review and test GitHub pull requests

This will also include hands-on activities to help us understand how we can get involved. 

Slides: https://tinyurl.com/267kw3j6

3:30 - 4:30

Underground Archives Tour

Experience the OAIS model in real life as we tour the Andersen Library archival storage facility eight stories below ground. Learn how archival records are ingested, described and stored, and made available to researchers from within the sandstone caverns.

5:00 - 7:00

Evening (TBD)

Join other attendees at a local establishment to continue your conversations or to start new ones. 

Breakfast (Provided)

Enjoy coffee and refreshments while you get ready for your day.

What's Impacting Our Repositories? Atmire Mini Workshop

Presenter: Ignace Deroost (Atmire)

DSpace 7 is a great overhaul for DSpace from a technological point of view as older technologies were replaced by modern day ones. In this process the DSpace community focussed on retaining maximal feature parity between DSpace 6 and 7 and avoided development of newer features. Even though accessibility was still recognized as a vital element early on in the Development of DSpace 7, the complex nature of achieving compliance with accessibility standards meant that such compliance was not feasible as part of the DSpace 7 developments. 

This doesn’t mean that no progress has been made. At the release of DSpace 7 the DSpace community leveraged the services of DeQue, a web accessibility company to examine DSpace 7’s compliance with the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. This resulted in a list of detected misalignments which partners in the DSpace community have been resolving since. Now, in an effort to obtain full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, an accessibility fund was established.

In addition, performance in DSpace 7 is also a topic receiving a lot of attention and causing frustration among repository managers, developers, and our users. One reason is due to AI bots that aggressively target DSpace repositories, while DSpace's default coping mechanisms were not built to handle these type of indexers. 

Ignace Deroost (Atmire) will elaborate on two major topics:

• accessibility in DSpace, and how to become accessible
• what's impacting repositories' performance nowadays & how can we deal with this as a community

Small Group Discussion: What's impacting YOUR repository?

Small group breakout session to share your institution's work in making your repository more accessible or how you are addressing performance issues and bot traffic. 

Break / Networking

• DCAT update: https://tinyurl.com/dcat-sept-2024
• Lunch options

Session: Improving User Experiences

Honoring Individual Works’ Copyrights in DSpace

Presenters: Heidi Winkler and Shelly Barba (Texas Tech University)

This presentation discusses the issues and best practices of honoring individual works’ copyrights in DSpace collections. Through exploring both faculty research and graduate research collections, we address the challenges of representing titles’ licensing in a way that enables users to best understand how they may interact with the work. We hope this presentation would foster discussion on the value of this metadata in DSpace and how to make it easier to highlight it. 

Slides: Issues in Individual Copyrights Metadata.pptx

How DSpace 7 Links Broke the Chains of our Repository

Presenter: Shelley Barba (Texas Tech University)

This presentation discusses a case study on our graduates’ music recital DSpace collection and our ongoing multi-year project to reorganize the collection for better access. The biggest breakthrough for this project was how key upgrades of DSpace 7 allowed us to untangle the concept of graduate recitals from traditional ETDs and improve user experience. The presentation includes a brief history of the collection, the most glaring issues with how we had been displaying the recitals in DSpace, the process in solving the issues, the continuing obstacles in maintaining a music recital collection, and our best practices that may help others with their similar collections.

DASH Stories: Qualitative IR Feedback

Presentation Slides

Presenters: Colin Lukens and Grace Dunbar (Harvard University)

We plan to briefly highlight our IR qualitative feedback service, DASH Stories. DASH Stories asks users to provide a short narrative on how the article, or open access in general, has benefited or affected them. Introduced in Harvard's DSpace instance in 2012, DASH Stories has received over 9000 responses from users of DASH. Some stories simply show appreciations for open access while others present moving tales of a life improved, access in the face of censorship, or meaningful connection with others. Our talk will overview this service, illustrate its new iteration in our newly migrated DSpace8 instance, and the collaboration to bring it forward.

Lunch (on your own)

We've organized small groups to walk to a handful of restaurants each.  Find out which groups are walking where by clicking here.

Session: Migrating Customizations in DSpace 7

Presenter: Carolyn Sullivan (University of Ottawa)

The University of Ottawa’s institutional repository, uO Research, hosts our electronic theses and dissertations, and faculty publications.  It is a bilingual repository with collections harvested by our library catalogue (Ex Libris’ Alma/Primo), OLRC (our cloud storage service), and Theses Canada (a theses discovery and preservation service). From July 2023 to February 2024, our team migrated our repository from version 6.3 to version 7.6, and since then, have continued to improve the usability of our repository.  

This presentation provides an overview of this migration from planning to deployment across all teams involved, including issues encountered, addressing functional differences DSpace 6.3 JSP and DSpace 7.6, and a retrospective of how we and other institutions can learn from our experience to better manage similar migrations.  I review how we recreated existing customizations and configurations in DSpace 7.6, with a focus on ensuring bilingualism.  Major aspects of improving the interface for bilingualism have included the creation and maintenance of custom information pages and forms, and the identification and maintenance of untranslated labels (both those present in DSpace, or appearing through external APIs).  Other major issues across teams included implementation of single sign-on for login, determining how to prevent crashes in production during high usage intervals by providing adequate server resources, and adapting to the new embargo workflows.  I conclude with a review of our ongoing development and metadata projects, including the creation of a customized interface to provide bot-free statistics and implementation of COAR best practices for multilingual repositories.

Presenter: Q'Sean Miller (Texas A&M University)

In the Fall of 2023, the team at Texas A&M University Libraries began upgrading our institutional repository, OAKTrust, from a customized DSpace 6.3 to the new DSpace 7. Our rich local feature set, developed over the years, brought technical challenges, but we embraced them with enthusiasm. 

Long-loved custom features faced careful evaluation—some were re-implemented, others retired, and a few replaced by exciting new features in DSpace 7. A critical requirement for us was the Solr indexing customizations. Full text search on some access-restricted items can reveal snippets of text in the gist’s in the search results, so we had to disable full-text extraction for sensitive documents. Additionally, we leveraged the DSpace Solr index to include readable community and collection names, enhancing our digital asset management ecosystem.  

The Custom Proxy License Step posed a challenge since DSpace 7 offers only one license. In our custom configuration we provided submitters to upload their own proxy license and provided additional license options to select from. 

Ensuring the integrity of two key integrations—the Vireo ETD submission system and our IIIF-based discovery applications from DSpace. We also tackled common DSpace 7 upgrade concerns: asset migration, database and index updates, authentication, metadata schema, and custom forms. 

We are thrilled to announce that we plan to go live with DSpace 7 in Summer 2024, perfectly timed as we start planning for DSpace 8! Our journey has been one of innovation and dedication, and we look forward to sharing the enhanced OAKTrust with our community. 

Session: Making Connections: Shared Repository Infrastructure & Data

Scholaris - Developing a New National Shared Repository Service in Canada

Presentation slides

Presenters: Julia Gilmore and Rachel Wang (University of Toronto/Scholars Portal)

Scholaris is a new national shared repository service that aims to support open discovery, management, sharing and preservation of Canadian scholarship. Building on expressed interest from Canadian institutions in shared repository infrastructure, the opt-in service is being developed by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), and the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL), in collaboration with regional consortia and the broader repository community. Scholaris uses DSpace software, with parallel instances hosted and managed by Scholars Portal through a software-as-a-service model. 

In Spring 2024, we launched an Early Adopters Program to work with institutions representing a variety of implementation and migration use cases. The program will involve Scholars Portal harmonizing migration of DSpace and non-DSpace repositories (e.g., EPrints, Bepress, Figshare, Islandora, and custom repository solutions) into a single DSpace version, as well as setting up new instances for schools at the beginning of their exciting(!) IR journeys. As we build the service, we are asking the following question: How can we achieve optimal economies of scale and position repository services to make the most of community experts and available resources?

In this presentation, the Scholaris service team (Scholars Portal) will describe how we are developing the Scholaris model (technical and community infrastructure) to meet identified needs and balance competing interests, and lessons learned from our early adopters. We’ll also share how we envision evolving the service in the future and contributing to the DSpace community. 

DSpace Integration for ETDs: From Submission to Discovery Using Vireo

Presentation Slides

Presenter: Christopher Starcher (Texas Tech University) and Nicholas Woodward (Texas Digital Library)

The Vireo Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Submission and Management System addresses all steps of the ETD publishing process, from submission of the defended dissertation to approval by the graduate office to publication in an institutional repository. It includes the ability to export completed ETDs in several formats, including DSpace METS SIP and Simple Archive Format. Additionally, the Vireo software can deposit ETDs directly into DSpace via the SWORD protocol, which is an interoperability standard that facilitates digital repositories accepting content in formats such as XML. On the digital repository side, DSpace offers the ability to customize several aspects of the Vireo deposit process, including authorization, packaging format, and ETD metadata. Our presentation will explain the ETD ingestion process from beginning to end, including tips and best practices for successfully integrating Vireo and your DSpace repository. We will also discuss the current state of depositing digital content into DSpace via the SWORD protocol and some potential avenues to improve the integration with Vireo.

Deploying a Research Dataset Catalog at Texas A&M University

Presentation Slides

Presenter: James Creel (Texas A&M University)

In the Spring of 2023, Texas A&M University Libraries were informed of an initiative from the Vice President for Research’s office to begin providing stewardship and oversight of research datasets throughout the research lifecycle.  In support of this effort, the Libraries were tasked with providing a catalog to provide indexing and discovery of TAMU datasets, whatever data repository may house them.

To prototype the catalog, TAMU Libraries has deployed a custom DSpace 7 instance that we have dubbed Data@TAMU (in sympathy with our scholarly profile management system, Scholars@TAMU).  We have bootstrapped this repository with initial records by collating data from the VPR’s research grant tracking system with data from Dimensions (a 3rd party service from the Digital Science company).  By collating these two sources, we are able to associate funded research projects with published datasets and create records for a DSpace collection.  We use a custom script to perform the collation and generate a spreadsheet that is then processed with SAFCreator to produce the import archive.

For auditing purposes, we must track the current steward of any given dataset.  For this, we have leveraged DSpace Entities, with separate Entity types for Dataset and for PDAC (Primary Data Access Contact).  We are developing custom logic to record chain of custody when a Dataset to PDAC Entity relation is changed.

Minor UI customizations allow us to link out to datasets in their host data repositories as well as out to researchers’ profiles in the Scholars@TAMU system.

Break / Networking

• Prep work for tomorrow's SAFCreator mini-workshop

Show & Tell: Your DSpace

Attendees are invited to come up and take two minutes to tell us something about your DSpace repository, your recent migration, or something special you would like to share.

Evening

Dinner on your own, or sign up to join a small group.

Breakfast (Provided)

Enjoy coffee and refreshments while you get ready for your day.

SAFCreator Mini Workshop

Presentation Slides

Presenter: James Creel (Texas A&M University)

SAFCreator is a lightweight Java desktop application for converting metadata spreadsheets and asset files into DSpace Simple Archive Format (SAF) archives for importation into DSpace repositories. Features include: Input of metadata and file references via CSV spreadsheets; ability to download remote asset files over HTTP; support for any desired schema.element.qualifier labels; support for multiple values in a given field; wildcards to select all the files in a directory; customizable item licenses; customizable read access policies on items; and modular verifiers to check the integrity of batches. The code is open source at https://github.com/jcreel/SAFCreator and is open for further development.

Many users have had difficulty running SAFCreator and other SAF related tools (like SAF Builder and PySAF) due to restrictions from their IT departments. We will look at workarounds for technical restrictions on use of managed machines. We will also provide a DSpace instance running on Amazon EC2. If you want to log in to the command-line and use the import script on this instance, you will need an ssh client such as PuTTY.  UPDATE:  ssh access is not necessary, as we can upload SAF as zipfiles through the UI.  That said, we can explore the command line interface if there is participant interest.

Batch upload documentation from UT San Antonio mentioned during the presentation. Includes screenshots and step by step instructions for how we use SAFCreator.

Break

Session: Preserving Podcasts in DSpace

Presenters: Erik Moore and Sarah Barsness (University of Minnesota)

Institutional repositories, like DSpace, are an ideal solution to preserving and making available institutional podcasts. Erik Moore (University of Minnesota) and Sarah Barsness (University of Minnesota) will discuss their efforts at capturing podcasts and making them available through the repository. This will include highlighting benefits DSpace brings to these efforts, including the in browser media player and OAI-PMH support. They will also discuss and share Python scripts written to aid in capturing the podcasts, associated metadata, and to help batch import the records into DSpace. 

Remarks & Appreciation

Lunch (on your own)

We'll provide you a list of restaurants within walking distance for you to explore and enjoy on your own or in small groups.