Page History

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• Agustina summarized last week's discussion highlights:
  • Limited work is needed to bring the communities together
  • There was also a point around a more inclusive governance structure, take into account smaller, less powerful institutions; this is an opportunity to take their voices into account
  • Take into account the extended use cases
  • Flexible, turn-key DSpace vs modularization 
  • Getting deeper understanding what DSpace CRIS is and try to reassure the community, focusing on the features so they know better
  • Wider issue around increased complexity of DSpace over time, trying to find ways to control this 
• Last meeting: suggestion to come up with focus groups; feeling that its adding too much structure and too much overhead
  • If assumption is right that most features are needed anyways in DSpace, we can continue with the structure 
  • General feeling is that the community is one; thing that majorly changes is shaping the releases 
  • The Library Code was asked by a client to recode the cover page on items; this is turned off by default in most repos because of conflicts with Google Scholar; point is: there are already features that are switched off by default that are niche features in DSpace
    • We just need to define: which functionality in DSpace or DSpace-CRIS are deprecated? Which are needed? All depends on list of features
• Pierre expressed that to him, these are two completely different systems; there may be overlap, convergence of functionality of DSpace with CRIS systems; what kind of features that are clearly meant for CRIS would be brought to the community? It does have consequences. What would be the specific CRIS needs that will be brought into DSpace in the way we prioritize things?
• What is a repo? digital objects plus metadata; What is a CRIS system? A system that collects metadata about certain objects, less files
  • It comes down to managing metadata and connecting entities 
  • CRIS gives more tools do deal with the flexibility of configurable entities
  • There is more security - there is more personal data
  • Need to have hierarchical metadata
  • There is nothing specific of a funding process - not a funding system; DSpace provides the infrastructure to do this stuff
• DSpace CRIS users are very few institutions that are not research output producing institutions - significant subset of DSpace users base
  • DSpace has been growing in terms of use cases, geographical locations
  • Example: multilingual - great feature
    • How are we going to deal with this? Are we going to focus on DSpace? 
    • Difference between CRIS and DSpace: CRIS makes better use of the possibility in which language a certain metadata field is being filled out 
    • Main question is: how do we deal with DSpace opening up to other users and use cases, outside of what is the dominant use case today? How do change governance so that we can make DSpace more usable for more use cases?
• One of the most important questions: why do we want to do this merger, because CRIS seems to be a completely different system; needs to be communicated
  • There are also CRIS users that use CRIS as a repository - why?
• Merger of DSpace and DSpace-CRIS is not about restructuring the community
  • There is no feature to the best of Andrea's knowledge that only serves DSpace-CRIS and couldn't serve DSpace
• CRIS can move much faster, it's much simpler for them to implement features without the community led review process
  • PRs are too cumbersome, we are not good enough with reviews, we are not good enough with helping out, these issues need to be brought again to Steering

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