2025-05-21 DSpace Leadership Group Meeting

Date

21 May 2025 11:00 am-1:00 pm EDT (Eastern Daylight Savings Time)

Zoom:  Link in calendar invite

Leadership Group Members

• Bridget AlmasLyrasis* (Ex-officio, Lyrasis seat)
• Pascal-Nicolas Becker The Library Code*
• Isabel Bernal Spanish National Research Council CSIC
  
• Andrea Bollini 
   4Science*
• Bill Branan Johns Hopkins University
• Kimberly Chapman University of Arizona Libraries (Ex-officio, DCAT Chair)
• user-58958 Duke University
• Lieven Droogmans Atmire*
• Mohit Garg Indian Institute of Technology Delhi**
• Scott Hanrath * (non-voting Steering attendee)
• Barbara Hirschmann ETH Zurich
• Jyrki Ilva National Library of Finland
•  Owen Iyoha, Eko-Konnect Research and Education Initiative**
  
• Erica Johns* (non-voting Steering attendee)
• Ed Kirkland University of Nottingham
• James MacKenzie University of New Brunswick 
  
• Agustina Martinez-Garcia University of Cambridge*
• Lautaro Matas  LA Referencia***
  
• Erik Moore University of Minnesota*
• Jere Odell  IU Indianapolis
• Kristi Park Texas Digital Library*
• Beate Rajski DSpace-Konsortium Deutschland
• Julien Sicot EPFL
• Paschal Ssemaganda World Bank Group
• Carolyn Sullivan University of Ottawa
• Ianthe Sutherland University of Edinburgh
• Maureen Walsh Chair, The Ohio State University Libraries*

DSpace staff attendees

• Tim Donohue 
• Holger Lenz 
• Michele Mennielli 

Guest

• Laurie Gemmill Arp 

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

**Community At Large Representative

***Ex-officio member nominated by the Leadership Group as representative of the community at large. Ex-officio members do not have voting rights

Agenda

Notes

Financials

3rd Quarter Financial Report, covering July 1, 2024 through March 30, 2025 reviewed.

Overall, it is positive to budget. Revenues had a positive variance for the fiscal year to date, largely attributable to greater than budgeted interest income, membership dues and service provider fees.  Expenses, with a negative variance are higher than originally budgeted, but actually a little lower than budgeted when we take into account the approved variance for additional SCOSS labor expenses.

Lyrasis

Laurie presented the new Lyrasis Community Supported Technologies (CST) Fund 

3-year Lyrasis Board approved funding offered to DSpace to support growth. There is no IDC charged on the funds.

The funds are available July 1st, but we are not obligated to start using them on that date

If we waited until later in the year to start using them, we would still have that full amount. If not fully spent, it would roll over into the next year, except the third year - no rollover (without a conversation).

If we accept the funds, we should have an idea of how we want to spend them for three years.

Membership

Invoices sent May 1st. So far we have 22 renewals

SCOSS contributor conversions to regular DSpace memberships are going well!

• Seven CRKN institutions joining as individual member 
• Swiss Academic Library Consortium will be joining as a consortium at the Platinum level 
• FinELib committed to a gold membership as a consortium.

We also have a new Gold member, University of Washington

We lost one bronze member due to funding issues, and the status of one gold member is uncertain due to funding issues.

Thank you to all of our new and continuing members!!!

Financials

Three scenarios for the 2025-2-26 budget were reviewed (A-C). (A= existing staff with no CST fund, B = using CST funds to hire a new technical support staff, C = using CST funds to offset a portion of the Tech Lead.)

Steering voted to recommend Scenario C to Leadership. The Steering vote was not unanimous. Scenario C was in first place with a majority of votes, Scenario B in second, and there were no votes for Scenario A.

Steering recommended accepting the Lyrasis CST funds. With Scenario C, the funds in the first year would be used to offset a portion of the Tech Lead's salary/fringe benefits with IDC savings on that portion. 

NOTE: Scenario C does not preclude hiring a new staff position in the next year, as the Tech Lead savings could be used for a new hire. Although, if membership turns out to have a negative variance due to the uncertainty with funding across the landscape, we could hold off on hiring and use the savings as an offset for negative variances.

Steering is not ready to recommend the nature and role of a potential new hire (either with Scenario B or C), as there will need to be a Governance effort at surfacing and understanding needs and opportunities and fleshing out the potential new role and developing a position description.

With Scenario B, we could let know Lyrasis know we would hold off hiring right away (not July 1st) to allow time to develop the position, and also to have a better sense of the success of the current membership drive.

Each scenario:

• adds a (varying) additional amount to the Reserve Operating Fund. The Governance Working Group will add the Reserve Operating Fund to its current governance document work. Governance had developed the reserve fund for the unexpected, for example a downturn in memberships. Our retained net assets can be used for such a sceanrio, but this is an intentional 'setting aside' of funds as a line item in the budget to intentionally save for a rainy day. Bridget is gathering data to model coverage of 3, 6, 12 months of average expenses.
• adds 5% to Michele's DSpace time
• adds one hour to Holger's DSpace time
• adds a placeholder for the demo servers ("Virtual Computer Services"). No decisions have been made regarding the hosting of the demo servers for 2025-2206.

The Chair will send out a ballot for Leadership to vote for the 2025-2206 budget. The Chair will add a Scenario D, to explicitly add using the CST funds but not adding a new staff member until and if we are ready in the first year.

Fundraising

Steering set up a one-to-one fundraising project to reach out to potential new members. For now it is outreach to organization that are not current members, but we may add outreach as part of the current membership drive as need. The Chair called for Leadership volunteers. Volunteers so far: Kristi, Maureen, Jere, Erik, Ianthe, and Carolyn. Holger and the Chair will reach out Leadership and Steering to kick off the project. We have an email template and spreadsheets to add contact suggestions, volunteer to contact, and track contacts and outreach.

Round Robin

Members offered their top of minds for the repository space. Topics included funding uncertainty, US federal accessibility guideline policy, and the increasing complexity of systems.

Development

Official DSpace 9.0 release announcement forthcoming.

Future Planning

The Strategic and Technology DSpace and DSpace-CRIS potential merger planning groups gave brief updates.

Future Planning

DSpace 10 priorities discussed. with the work around a potential merger, 10 will be similar to 9 in approach.

Refreshing/revisiting/convening a new visioning group discussed in Steering was discussed with Leadership. Leadership concurred with the idea. The Chair called for expressions of interest/volunteers. Agustina and Ianthe are interested.

Governance

The Governance Working Group is currently working on draft bylaws and will share with Steering next.

DCAT

DSpace 9.0 Testathon went well with global participation welcomed.

An update to the community from the potential merger planning groups, or Steering, would be helpful.

Leadership feedback for the UX subgroup was solicited.

Communications/Outreach

Holger is working on a webinar series.

Global Outreach

Michele was in Qatar at an event organized by the Qatar National Library. Possibility of a new DSpace member.

Michele attended the National User Group meeting in Poland, the community is really growing, the intent is for ~15 institutions to join at the Platinum level.

Community

The Chair will reach out for those interested in meeting up at OR25.

Lyrasis

LA Referencia project update shared. There is a specific website up and running where you can find updates. They ran a survey and collected information from 160 institutions.

They hired two developers and started contributing to the codebase and GitHub.

They have been working on translations of documentations in Spanish and Portuguese.

They have test servers for versions 8 and 9.

Meetings

The Chair solicited ideas for future meetings.

Other business

No other business

Action Items

• Leadership notes
• Budget voting
• Fundraising volunteers and project kick off
• New visioning work to be charged by Steering
• Type your task here, using "@" to assign to a user and "//" to select a due date
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