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Please prepare the abovementioned questions in advance of the meeting. You can leave your answer to those questions in a comment below. In case you can not attend the meeting but would like to share your opinion, feel free to leave a comment as well. 

Meeting notes

Part 1: Core functionalities of DSpace

Following are non exhaustive lists based on the outcomes of our discussion. The goal of this part of the meeting was to list the main features in DSpace. The underlying idea is when we improve those features the overal admin user experience will increase.

Which admin features are used most often:

  • Editing metadata
  • Eperson management and authorization: This, however, still is a labour intensive process in most cases. Adding Epersons to certain groups is often done manually.

Which features are seldom used:

We went over this question rather quickly. It was clear that nearly all of the mentioned features are relatively new and might still need to find their way in.

One of those less used features in DSpace are curation tasks. The reason why this is not often used might be that those are not very well organised, which hampers the work.

Another feature is the versioning feature. This one has the limitation that the versioning form is the same as the submission form, while admins usually try to keep submission forms as easy as possible, but require a more elaborate form for versioning.

What should be configurable in the admin UI (Without having to reboot afterwards):

  • Themes: admins should be able to select different themes for each collection or community without requiring any technical assistance from developers. They should be able to adapt the basic look and feel of the communities and collections they're in charge of. 
  • Facets: Admins should be able to conveniently add or remove sidebar facets.
  • Changing the submission forms: Admins can alter the metadata schema's, but not the fields included in the submission form itself. Also, it would be a great improvement if submission forms could be tailored to the collection one is submitting to.

Part 2: Most important UI functionalities

Which features should definitely remain in the UI: 

  • Sidebar facets
  • Custom themes

Which features should be improved or created:

  • Submissions: Still a lot of users find submitting to DSpace difficult. It would be great if we could further improve the ease of use for submissions.
  • Visible relationships between bitstreams: this needs to be created as currently there is no way to visually indicate bitstream relatedness.
  • Audiovisual content streaming: DSpace does not support the streaming of video or audio files. A lot of DSpace admins now have to rely on third party services to stream their audiovisual content. It would be convenient if such a feature is integrated in DSpace. 
  • item pages: Most visitors land on those pages after searching google or an other search engine. The bitstream download link could be displayed more clearly however. Also the item page itself could have a cleaner overview. 

Call Attendees