Meeting Information

Date and Time: April 2, 2025, 16:00-17:00UTC

Meeting link: See calendar invitation

Attendees

• Pascal-Nicolas Becker 
• Andrea Bollini (4Science) 
• Lieven Droogmans 
• Jyrki Ilva 
• Pierre Lasou 
• Agustina Martinez-Garcia 
• Ianthe Sutherland 
• Dirk Verdicchio 
• Erica Johns 

Ex-Officio:

• Tim Donohue 
• Holger Lenz 

  Note taker

Apologies

• Isabel Bernal
• Maureen Walsh 

Agenda

Notes

Key Highlights from DSpace Praxistreffen

• Pascal thanked Atmire for sending Bram, 4Science for sending Andrea, Holger for traveling
• The elephant in the room was the merger
• Pascal gave summary of the panel discussion (fast forward to 58:56) around the merger
  • The panel started with a brief introduction, then questions
  • People asked how they could help to make the merger happen or how they could help move it forward faster
  • In Europe, CRIS is used more than in the US; They are not asking if they are part of DSpace or DSpace-CRIS community, they perceive it as one community
  • A lot of DSpace-CRIS users in Germany are part of the consortium, they provide money to DSpace, provide code, take part in developer meetings
  • From point of view of community in Germany, there is no discussion around two communities - DSpace-CRIS is not a community product, it needs to become a community product - that's our task
  • What also came up: what features will be merged, how will this affect my repository?
  • Most of the specific featurs are related to how relationships are working, how entities are working; need accessibility on metadata fields; these things are perhaps CRIS functionality, but they are things that we need anyways for entities to properly work; can we assume that most of the CRIS features are features we need in DSpace anyways?

Documentation in CRIS is not as good as DSpace documentation 

We need better documentation on DSpace-CRIS

Can we move CRIS documentation to Lyrasis documentation?

Andrea had a workshop on DSpace-CRIS

Which feature would prevent DSpace-CRIS user to move to merged solution (which would be a show stopper)

8 features were listed as absolutely necessary

Andrea: happy to support collaborative effort on documentation 

History: when started on version 5, documentation was on Lyrasis wiki, but got very limited contribution; then moved to internal wiki; any release, create PDF export of documentation and published on GItHub (large PDF, publicly and freely available); if there is a chance to have the commuity invovled, would be happy to move it back to Lyrasis wiki; limitation: just single space for CRIS, which is then not the same as DSpace wiki, which supports several spaces

Jyrki: Wonder if it would make sense to send out a survey to find out not just from CRIS users but also from DSpace users what they would like and how they see a future product

Tim and Holger do not know if its possibly to move the CRIS documentation to the Lyrasis wiki

DSpace pays for the Lyrasis wiki - would need to find out and discuss this further 

Just making the 4Science wiki publicly available would not work, confluence is paid per user 

We need to first clear this on the Lyrasis side (how much would this impact cost?), then bring it to Steering 

Lieven asked about the survey that was sent discussed during the Praxistreffen

Scenario discussion: 

Based on discussion we had last week: 

• 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 resources; this is an opportunity to take their voices into account
• Take into account the extended use cases
• Flexible turnkey DSpcae vs modularization 
• Getting deeper understanding what DSpcae CRIS is and try to reasure the community, focusing on the features so they know better
• Wider issue around increased compleixity of DSpcae 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 

Until we see that we need that, until we have functionality lists

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 

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

Action Items

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