Contribute to the DSpace Development Fund
The newly established DSpace Development Fund supports the development of new features prioritized by DSpace Governance. For a list of planned features see the fund wiki page.
Leadership Group Members
- Tal Ayalon, World Bank Group
Pascal-Nicolas Becker, The Library Code*- Allan Bell, The University of British Columbia
- Kimberly Chapman, University of Arizona Libraries
Susanne Chase, Georgetown UniversityLieven Droogmans, Atmire*- Scott Hanrath, University of Kansas*
- Barbara Hirschmann, ETH Zurich
Kirsty Lingstadt, University of Edinburgh- Jyrki Ilva, National Library of Finland
- Andrew McLean, Imperial College London
Paolo Mangiafico, Duke UniversityLautaro Matas, LA Referencia- Agustina Martínez-García, University of Cambridge*
Andrés Melgar, ConcytecRobert Miller, LYRASIS- Erik Moore, University of Minnesota
- Susanna Mornati, 4Science*
Jere Odell, IUPUI*- Kristi Park, Texas Digital Library* (Chair)
- Beate Rajski, DSpace-Konsortium Deutschland
- Gail Steinhart, Cornell University Library
- Maureen Walsh, The Ohio State University Libraries* (Vice Chair)
Wei Xuan, University of Manitoba
LYRASIS attendees
Laurie ArpMichele Mennielli- Tim Donohue
- Jenn Bielewski
The represents who will be taking notes for a given meeting. It rotates after each meeting to the next person in the attendee list.
*Members of DSpace Steering Group
Meeting time: 4PM-6PM UTC
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Meeting ID: 502 527 3040
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Agenda
# | Time | Item | Information | Who |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 min | Welcome |
| Kristi Park |
| 2 | 25 min | DSpace 7.x Development Report | Update on the current status of DSpace 7 development and the forthcoming beta versions.
| Tim Donohue |
| 3 | 5 min |
| Maureen Walsh | |
| 4 | 5 min | Working and Interest Group Reports | Kristi Park (chair, Governance Working Group) Scott Hanrath (chair, Product Visioning Working Group) Jenn Bielewski (chair, Marketing Interest Group) | |
| 5 | 10 min | Financial and Fundraising Report | Report shared in Google Group reflects info as of May 31, 2021. Full-year financials available later in July.
End-of-year appeal sent to US, Canadian and select non-NA members.
SCOSS Update | Kristi Park, Michele Mennielli |
| 6 | 10 min | Promotion of DSpace 7.0 | Presentation of Marketing Interest Group ideas for promotion of DSpace 7 | Jenn Bielewski |
| 7 | 40 min | Discussion: DSpace 7 Promotion | Leaders will break into 4 randomly assigned groups to further discuss promotion of DSpace 7. Each group will be tasked with brainstorming ideas; identifying resources and challenges for activities; and identifying how they can contribute. We will take 25 minutes for breakout discussions and then return for 15 minutes to report out and discuss with the whole group. Guide for breakout discussions:
| Kristi, Jenn, all |
| 8 | 10 min | Elections and Governance Roles | Looking ahead to the next (final) meeting of the governance year and preparing for next year.
| |
| 9 | 5 min | Any other business, as time allows |
|
Notes:
1 Welcome
Kristi opened the meeting.
2 DSpace 7.x Development Report
Tim gave an update on the release of DSpace 7.0 and the next steps after it.
DSpace 7 had a lot of visibility at OR2021, and the official release date (August 2) was announced during the conference. The developers have been internally working for July 26, which is a week before the announced deadline. There are still a few high-priority tasks that need to be completed. Currently the work is slightly off-track for July 26, but will definitely be ready by August 2. Tim has already been working with Jenn on planning the marketing efforts for 7.0, including new videos.
As noted in the previous discussions, DSpace 7.0 will be missing a number of features that were available in previous versions. These will be added in the forthcoming versions, starting from 7.1. The prioritization of missing features has been done based on a survey conducted with Leadership members a few months ago. The features have been divided into five tiers, and even within each tier they are ranked. After 7.0 has been released these will be structured to releases.
The developers have agreed to a plan to issue a new 7.x release once a quarter. These will have strict deadlines, and the order of implementation for features will be based on prioritization. Some features have already been estimated, others will be soon. In addition to features each of the releases will also include bug fixes and code restructuring. Some releases may have more of these than the others. There will be documentation available which will help the organizations to decide when to upgrade.
There were a couple of questions about the release timeline and how easy it is to predict which version will include certain things. Tim noted that Tier 1 will be done first, then Tier 2, unless there are some big tasks that need more work that can be done at that point or if there are tasks that are connected to each other. It’s hard to say for sure at which point all of the missing features will be completed, as this depends on funding and the amount of developer time that is available. So far there’s a promise of funded development up to 7.1. This is something that the DSpace governance will have to discuss later on.
As in the past, it will be possible to skip versions in upgrading to the latest version of DSpace.
Kristi thanked Jere, Beate and Agustina for their help in creating the prioritization.
3 DSpace Community Advisory Team report
Maureen provided an overview of recent DCAT activities.
DCAT did a lot of work with the DSpace 7 testathon, helping to set up the tasks, with announcements and with actual testing. Overall, testathon was a success. DCAT was also involved with the planning of DSpace events at OR2021, including the Repository Rodeo session.
In addition, DCAT has been working on DSpace 7 documentation. Among others, DSquare Technologies has done a lot of work with DSpace documentation. It was agreed that the DSpace 7 documentation should be in the public wiki (as in the past) so that the developers can easily update it.
4 Working and Interest Group Reports
Kristi reported that the governance working group hasn´t had meetings, but their recommendations on a new governance year ending at the end of October will be implemented.This means that the 2020-2021 Leardership group will have one more meeting by October.
Scott reported that the product visioning working group has conducted structured interviews with three service providers. The work will continue with national groups and other service providers.
Jenn informed that the marketing working group has been meeting twice a month. One meeting is devoted to general DSpace issues and the other one on DSpace 7. The group is also discussing updates to the website and social media. There are plans to launch of a new DSpace Digest in mid-August, and the group is also working on annual DSpace report.
5 Financial and Fundraising Report
Kristi presented the DSpace financial report, which had been sent to the Leadership members beforehand. The current report is until the end of May, so it´s still missing the last month of the budget year. According to the report there were USD 22.000 left in net assets, which means that the project was in a pretty good shape. DSpace was ahead in on membership income, but behind in fund-raising. Not all of the development for 7.0 had been invoiced yet. The net assets will be used to pay for development first before using line of credit.
A fundraising e-mail has been sent to North-American DSpace members and select number of other organizations. Kristi noted that he Texas Digital Library will make their decision on additional support for DSpace 7 development in August.
Kristi informed that LYRASIS has been working with SCOSS and new information about this should be publicly available day now.
6 Promotion of DSpace 7.0
Jenn gave an overview of the planned promotional efforts for DSpace 7 and DSpace in general. Once 7.0 is out, there will be a press release which will be sent to the Google groups and social media. The web site will also be updated to include DSpace 7 information and links to other resources including videos.
The planned DSpace Digest will include DSpace news, interviews, case studies and information on what's next for DSpace. There are other ideas as well. The frequency of publication will be decided once it is known how much content there will be.
There were questions about the distribution channels and target audience for the Digest. If it is mainly disseminated to the known DSpace users, how can we reach new people? It was agreed that the Digest should be publicly available on the web and it should be advertised via social media channels.
There was also discussion on the number of early adopters of DSpace and whether we already know about their plans. It was noted that if there are only a very small number of early adopters, it may not be realistic to build a promotional campaign around them. It was argued that small repositories would be more likely to upgrade early as they don’t necessarily have resources to as much customization as some of the big organizations have done. There may also be new users that don’t need any of the missing features from past versions. Susanna reported that as a service provider 4Science has already been discussing the adoption DSpace 7 with their clients: at the moment all of them would like to wait and see until the release of DSpace 7.0 to see how it works for them.
7 Discussion: DSpace 7 Promotion
The discussion on DSpace marketing efforts was continued in three breakout groups (see the notes for each of the groups: #1, #2, #3). There was a wrap-up with further discussion after the breakout groups. Some of the points that came up were:
- Andrew suggested that DSpace 7 is a big change, a giant leap forward for the platform. It was agreed that it could be even portrayed as a rebirth or regeneration. Gail echoed this and said that DSpace has been around for a long time, but it will now be a platform based on modern technologies once again.
- It was agreed that it would be a good idea to highlight the exciting breakout features for the DSpace 7 promotion. Erik pointed out the ability to play videos and audio. GDPR compliance and the entities were also mentioned. Tim noted that the developers are currently so entrenched in DSpace that they may not have a clear idea of what is exciting anymore. Testimonials from DSpace users about what they find exciting – even if they are not upgrading now – would be useful. There should be user-perspective videos as well. It might be also worthwhile to produce comparison charts with other platforms like Digital Commons. It would be useful to have guidance on how to use the new features.
- Gail and Barbara reminded the group that there were testimonials collected from a number of institutions excited about DSpace 7 already a while ago. These haven’t been used so far. Jenn promised to check them to see if they are still valid.
- The global outreach was seen as a challenge, as there are relatively few truly international channels that can be used and many of the discussions are on a national or regional level. The Open Repositories conferences are distributing their announcements to various lists around the world: perhaps DSpace could do something similar? Reaching out to national user groups is also important in getting the information out. In addition to Open Repositories, it would be good to have visibility at other conferences with different audiences (e.g. LIBER for European research libraries). Co-operation with COAR was also mentioned. Iryna Kuchma at EIFL would be a good starting point as well.
- It would also be useful to have a more reliable, up-to-date view on who is actually using DSpace at the moment. OJS has been able to do this somehow. It might be worthwhile to find out how. Another option would be to update the DSpace registry.
- One idea that came up was doing a community poll using the Google groups mailing lists. Since these are just lists of e-mail addresses, we don’t really know how well the DSpace members or DSpace users are represented on the lists. Community calls are also an option.
- There was also discussion whether it would make to sense reach out to the community by establishing regular community office hours during which the community members could ask questions from the developers and/or Leadership. Tim mentioned that he has tried this in the past, but there was little response. Nevertheless, he finds the concept interesting. Gail noted that there will be a lot of interest in what features will be in DSpace 7.x. during the following year.
It was agreed that the marketing group should be able to develop these ideas further and come back with a more concrete plan on how to move forward with promotional efforts.
8 Elections and Governance Roles
The calendar invite for the last meeting of this group will be sent out soon. The elections of the new Leadership group will take place by October and the new governance year starts in November. Kristi mentioned that she will be stepping down from the Leadership chair position and Maureen will be stepping down from the DCAT chair role.
9 Any other business, as time allows
Kristi ended the meeting by noting that the DSpace-COAR MoU will be discussed in the next Leadership meeting.
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