Contribute to the DSpace Development Fund

The newly established DSpace Development Fund supports the development of new features prioritized by DSpace Governance. For a list of planned features see the fund wiki page.

This is a priority identified by the October 2011 community survey on improving metadata support authored by the DSpace Community Advisory Team at the request of the DSpace Committers/Developers. DCAT has summarized and interpreted the information gathered from the survey estimated level of effort required. DSpace community members should feel free to add more detailed explanation/examples to further flesh out the changes/requirements they would like to see. It is recommended that a community project team be formed around this work.   

Project Description

  • Open up rights to use a controlled vocabulary and link from an external source

    : 
    • Although you can manage the metadata scheme in the DSpace data model, there is little out-of-the-box support for vocabularies (like DCMI Type) and encoding schemata.
    • authority controls exist already, need to identify what specifically the community needs/what will work better
    • develop educational materials/tutorials for the community about the current add-on
    • not allowed to ship DSpace w/Library of Congress headings
    • update challenge - need to open up rights to use a controlled vocabulary and link from an external source so it doesn't have to be brought into DSpace
      • example: Nat'l Agricultural Library - linked open data, LC, subject based, NLM

Estimated Effort Level Required

LEVEL OF COMMUNITY EFFORT: likely medium to high
LEVEL OF DEVELOPER EFFORT: likely medium to high

Project Team

If you would like to participate or lead this project team, please identify yourself here and/or send a message to the dspace-tech mailing list.

David Isaak (Participate) - david.c.isaak@kpchr.org 

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3 Comments

  1. David Isaak

    As a repository manager I am interested in seeing the name authority control features fleshed out. I have two areas of concern:

    1) My institutional repository deals with scientific journal articles, so most of the authors are not included in traditional authority files like LCNAF/NACO. So just allowing DSpace to link to external sources is not enough.  

    2) The current authroty control feature is for the name heading, but I need to track other metadata regarding the author for my IR. Currently I maintain a separate relational database outside of DSpace to track:

    • Authorized name heading
    • name variants (nick names, change of last name, other forms of published name)
    • organizational affiliations (like department)
    • City and State
    • Email

    Currently, information like email is included in the item record, but it is not about the item itself. It would be nice if DSpace could store and display author metadata in an author record that links to the item record.  

  2. David Isaak

    Thinking about it further, maybe allowing DSpace authority control to hook up to VIVO as an external source would go a long way to solving both my concerns- it would not rely on somthing like LCNAF and it would include other author metadata.

  3. Jacob Andersson

    As I've commenter in another development suggestion we also need to be able to do things like attach metadata to authors. It is a requirement from our National Library.

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