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Date

17 Feb 2021

Attendees

• Tal Ayalon
• Kimberly Chapman
• Scott Hanrath

• Barbara Hirschmann

• Agustina Martínez-García
• Beate Rajski
• Sarah Swanz

Discussion items

Notes 

Introductions

Barbara:  Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) DSpace since 2017, moved from two separate Fedora instances. Publications and data repository. Atmire is their service provider.

Tal: World Bank Group, using DSpace for the past 9 years. The Open Knowledge Repository was launched in 2012. Vendor is Atmire as well. Looking forward to upgrade to DSpace.

Kimberley: University of Arizona. Campus repository is our institutional repository. Started around 2010 - hosted option as they lacked internal technical resource. Started with Open Repository Service (Biomed Central owned at the time) before it was bought by Atmire. Interested to see how things are currently being developed, interested to compare out of the box with vendor provided solutions. Also work with Figshare for research data as the Campus repository does not meet all the requirements of researchers. Interested in DSpace interoperability as well.

Sarah: Vanderbilt University. Publications repository. Similar issues with research data. Just upgraded to DSpace v6.

Beate: Self-hosted for the last couple of years. Decided to start with DSpace due to the community-driven nature. Moved to DSpace-CRIS for their OA repository mostly owing to the availability of ORCID integration. Entities is one of the most important functionalities. Open AIRE 3 compliant, already using sign posting, etc.

Agustina: Lead the Open Research Systems team at the University of Cambridge (UK) which is based at the University Library. Apollo, our institutional repository, is based on DSpace (currently on v5.10). We are using DSpace on premises since 2003 and have used Atmire for our big upgrades. We host all the University's research outputs including scholarly content, theses and dissertations, and research datasets. We are looking forward to DSpace v7 and are planning to conduct a wider repository landscape review in the upcoming months where we will be looking at a range of platforms, not only DSpace. This will inform the future of our repository.

Scott: University of Kansas, Associate Dean for Research Engagement. On premise instance, DSpace v5 at the moment, in process of upgrading to v6. Theses and dissertations is a big part of our repository. Work with OJSs too. My role as chair: facilitate this group, make sure we are clear of what's expected from our group. Looking forward to learning from the group.

WG charge and background

We have a good range of perspectives from the different institutions in the group. Another important purpose of the group is to listen and bring in the communities’ needs (community members, external stakeholders). The group's outputs will hopefully help other groups to develop fine-grained use cases.

Stakeholder groups to consider:

• User community
• Service providers (SPs). SPs are key, as they have in depth knowledge of DSpace 7, so we need to think about best ways to engage with them (some have already expressed interest in supporting this group)
• External stakeholders such as COAR

The DSpace Steering and Leadership group can be used as a sounding board for our work.

One challenge that has been identified is how do we work with the community re DSpace 7 when they are still far out from adopting it.

Suggestion for the group's initial milestone: incorporate a gap analysis as one of the deliverables of this group. Look at previous DSpace roadmaps and see what we are missing. (tentative July timeframe for this milestone). Also incorporate the breakout discussions around future integrations in the last DSpace Leadership group

• We could potentially use COAR's NGR behaviours as another source for the gap analysis (https://ngr.coar-repositories.org/).
• Look at standards in the research data community (e.g. white papers on best practices on data repositories)
• Take into account CRIS functionality. Product visioning should include a common vision to get rid of DSpace CRIS versus DSpace core divide.
• DSpace 7 is trying to bridge the gap between the UI divide (XMLUI vs JSPUI).
• Customisations: it would be helpful to have a comprehensive list of customisations that were made for different customers from the vendors. Catalog divided by themes, repository work functions. We would like to know more about how customizations developed by vendors or other third parties might inform the product vision or open source development priorities.
• When looking at DSpace 8 we need decisions on the open-source model, and ways of defining was is "core". Find ways of getting the community together and find solutions that are relevant to many stakeholders.
• This development piece about customisations was exacerbated in the past because of the DSpace UI divide (xmlui vs jspui). Hopefully, DSpace 7 will help with this and we can focus on determining what's in DSpace core versus customisations. There is also the issue of versions becoming out of support.

Review resources

• We have an initial list of internal DSpace docs, see agenda items
• Additional suggestions:
• Standards / white papers around research data management and best practices
• COAR principles, https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/what-we-do/next-generation-repositories/
• Customisations catalog
• Another source could be current functionality in CRIS systems

Next steps

Idea of gap analysis is very welcome by the group. Something quite useful initially would be to look at what's not in DSpace 7 that is already articulated in other global initiatives such as COAR.

Regarding sources review and engagement with the community, two options are proposed by Scott:

• focus on gather all resources needed before reaching out the community.
• Or we could to the review in parallel with reaching out to our stakeholders?

Group agrees to conduct research first and that can then be the basis for talking to stakeholders.

Actions

• Agree ways of working and communications: arrange a regular recurrent time - monthly meetings (agreed). Scott to send doodle poll with suggested recurrent times for meetings and explore creating a slack channel for the group.
• All: add resources to the group's page (https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/DSpace+Product+Visioning+Group).
• All: bring forward three high level areas of concern for our next meeting. Steps: identify additional resources, review resources and from those resources identify 3 broad areas that are not addressed in DSpace 7.1/2.