DCAT Meeting December 2025

What is DCAT?

The DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) represents the interests of repository managers and administrators across the globe and, indirectly, DSpace end users. DCAT is a permanent DSpace Working Group sponsored by the DSpace Steering Group that advises DSpace Program governance groups. We welcome feedback and participation from anyone in the community.

Date & Time

• Tuesday, December 9, 2025, 12:00 Eastern Time
• See the world clock to determine the meeting time for your location.
• Meeting length: one hour

Join information:

We will be using the DCAT Chair's Zoom Room for our meeting.

NOTE: there is a new passcode to enter the meeting: dspace2025

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://umn.zoom.us/j/95455262817?pwd=Z3o5BexR7gsspIzDiP7beexkthKR4i.1 (Meeting ID: 954 5526 2817) Passcode: dspace2025

Additional ways to join: DCAT Chair Zoom Room

Agenda and Notes:

• Announcements
  • Housekeeping
    • Sign up for the DCAT Google Group: https://groups.google.com/g/DSpaceCommunityAdvisoryTeam
    • Do you have a DSpace wiki account? Email wikihelp@lyrasis.org for an account
    • DSpace Community Events Calendar: https://dspace.org/events/
    • DSpace Slack channel: https://dspace-org.slack.com

• • DSpace and DSpace-CRIS Merger Approved
    • DSpace Leadership Group approved the merger on November 19 and DSpace Steering Group approved the merger on November 12
    • See the November 24, 2025 Announcement on the DSpace Community Google Group or the DSpace Community Advisory Team Google Group for more details

• • New Video describing How DSpace Governance Leaders are Chosen (3:37 minutes)

• Upcoming Events
  • Call for Proposals for 2026 Library Publishing Forum, deadline extended to January 5, 2026
    • Conference is in-person at the University of Washington, Seattle, June 17-18

• Highlights from recent events?
  • Matomo and DSpace Webinar (4Science)
    • DSpace documentation: Matomo Integration - available in D9
    • Matomo is an open source, GDPR-compliant alternative to Google Analytics
    • Interest in creating a comparison chart for Matomo and Google Analytics
      
      
  • 2025 Northeast Institutional Repository Day (NIRD25) 
    • Online Conference
    • Thursday, December 4, 2025 - 1:00pm - 5:00pm Eastern AND Friday, December 5, 2025 - 10am - 1:00pm Eastern 
    • https://zenodo.org/communities/nird/about (presentations should be up in a week or two)
    • Reflections from organizers - nice to see the growth of the conference, breadth of presentations, and the discussions/resources shared in the chat over the 2 days 
      
      
• Discussion and Presentation:
  • Cleaning up old DSpace GitHub Tickets and Issues
    • List of old DSpace GitHub issues or tickets that are still open: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20sort%3Acreated-asc
    • The Problem: GitHub board and list of open issues and PRs has grown over time. 
      • Some PRs go back to 2015, some issues back to 2012. 
      • Most tickets are related to the DSpace backend (less on Angular frontend) 
      • DSpace Developer Community is looking for a tool to flag and auto-close 'stale' issues and PRs 
    • How can DCAT help? 
      • Review old issues, asking:
        • Is the issue still understandable?
        • Is there still activity/discussions around the issue?
        • Was it documented for an unsupported version of DSpace (6 or older?) 
        • Is there a PR made on the issue? Is the PR old too?
        • Is the user still part of or is still around/involved in the Dspace community?
      • Determine what needs to be retested
      • DCAT Working Group to review the tickets?
      • Raising certain tickets relevant to DCAT (e.g., those that mention requesting support/input from DCAT) 
    • Guidance for understanding DSpace GitHub and ticketing process
      • How to create a bug ticket (DSpace Community 101)
      • How to submit a ticket to the DSpace issue tracker (DSpace wiki) 
      • From Load Times to Bot Traffic:  A comprehensive approach to DSpace performance (Atmire, Open Repositories 2025 presentation) - includes suggestions for testing/reviewing performance issues

• Future DCAT Topics?
  • Workgroup Update - Import Metadata feature (in Jan)
  • Entities Exploration (in spring)
  • Preparation for Testathon for version 10
    • Looks like some DSpace-CRIS features will be added for D10 (TBD)
    • Some changes with Entities moving toward merger (DSpace-CRIS and DSpace Differences)
  • Aspects of Digital Preservation in DSpace
    • Interoperability Project with Lyrasis Dec 10 or 11- digital preservation as an option

• Next Meeting: January 13, 2026

Notes:

Asked who is using Google Analytics and interest in using Matomo Analytics for DSpace sites.

Interest in comparison for both Analytics tools.

Suggestion to share effort to review old tickets and issues to a wider audience.

One of the three Scholaris Expert Groups is looking at how DSpace supports Digital Preservation. 

Call Attendees

Kent Gerber University of Minnesota Libraries

Kimberly Chapman University of Arizona Libraries

Emily Crawford, State Library of Massachusetts

Karl Wirth Creighton University

Marcella Huggard Lyrasis

Genny Jon York University, Toronto

Pierre Lasou Université Laval, Québec

Ashley Cate, University of Tennessee

Bailey Hoffner, Oklahoma State University

Nadine Seekirchner ETH Zurich

Matt McKinney, Texas Tech University

Allison Fischbach Johns Hopkins University

Julia Gilmore Scholaris / University of Toronto Scholars Portal

Jordan Piščanc (4Science) 

Erin Jerome, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Yohann Cottin, uOttawa Library

Bill Tantzen University of Minnesota Libraries

Fede Federico Verlicchi 4Science

Regrets