At the request of the DSpace Committers and Developers, the 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
* Top 5 metadata schemas to include in DSpace, in order of priority: Dublin Core, MODS, PREMIS, Open URL ContextObject, ETD-MS
*72% it is a priority to add metadata authority controls/vocabularies to the data model
*62% it is a priority to have enhanced metadata for Communities, Collections and/or individual Files (bitstreams)
*56% it is a priority to update to update the Qualified Dublin Core registry to the lastest standards of the DCMI
*54% would not have objections to prohibiting changes/deletions that would break compliance with the standardized default Dublin Core metadata schema
The complete survey results are available here: INSERT LINK
Where do we go from here?
From the survey it is clear that there are improvements to metadata support in DSpace that could help solve some common challenges for many organizations. Many will agree that there is no one size fits all repository software. DSpace is the most popular repository software, used by over 1000 organizations for a reason – it is relatively easy to get a repository up and running. If we are to add more complexity/flexibility to DSpace we need to be careful that it is not at the cost of making it more difficult for the vast majority of DSpace use cases. In addition, there are existing software solutions that provide for the ultimate in flexibility, namely Fedora. With that in mind, DCAT has proposed exploring the following priorities with the DSpace Committers/Developers and the user community:
1) Adding metadata authority controls/vocabularies to the data model: Since there is an existing add-on for controlled vocabularies (INSERT LINK), DCAT interprets this to mean that the rights to use a controlled vocabulary and possibly link from an external source. Some examples would be the National Agricultural Library (linked open data) and the National Library of Medicine (subject based).
2) Updating the Qualified Dublin Core registry to the current DCMI standards and locking it down (allow adds, but not changes or deletions that would break compliance) as well as isolating where customizations are done to ensure better standardization
3) Enhancing the metadata available for Community, Collections and Files (bitstreams)
4) Improvements in the UI - simplifying where/how things are done and bring more functionality to the UI, some examples include:
- import/export to metadata other than DC (like in Eprints where you pick a format for export)
- local customization
- how to plug in metadata schemas
- expose RDF triples
5) Explore how to create hierarchal metadata - should be approached with great care. Any new work shouldn't contradict future plans or approaches to move DSpace closer to the Fedora model (in which metadata is not stored in the DB but rather in files).
- move away from flat DC which doesn't have relational aspects and towards relational aspect functionality - like MODS
- allow relationships between community/collection/bitstream metadata
- possible iterative solution - create functionality that emulates hierarchal behavior
- example: adding in author affiliation or metadata on bitstream - related back to items
