At the request of the DSpace Committers and Developers, the DSpace Community Advisory Team (https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/cmtygp/DSpace+Community+Advisory+Team) (DCAT) has begun an effort to build a community consensus on improving the metadata support in future DSpace releases. Last month this process began with a community survey to collect feedback on what improvements organizations would like to see relative to metadata support in DSpace.
Survey Result Highlights
* 84% of respondents use DSpace or plan to use DSpace
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5) Explore the implications of offering hierarchal metadata in DSpace and whether it makes sense, given the DSpace/Fedora integration work. Hierarchal metadata would allow for relationships between community/collection/bitstream metadata. Because Fedora metadata is not stored in the database, as it is in DSpace, but in files, the relational aspect functionality in Fedora is more flexible. It is hoped that the DSpace/Fedora integration work would take advantage of Fedora's Fedora’s flexibility. DCAT proposes that the community explore the implications/reasonableness of a separate effort on hierarchal metadata in addition to the DSpace/Fedora integration.
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If any of the above priorities are important to you or your organization, we need your help. In order to move forward we need plan to put together a project team from the user community for each priority. If there are no volunteers, there will likely be no meaningful movement forward. Please contact Valorie Hollister at vhollister@duraspace.org in you are interested in contributing your time and effort.