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
• Pascal gave a high level 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?
• Andrea had a workshop on DSpace-CRIS and asked: 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
• Lieven asked about the survey that was sent discussed during the Praxistreffen
  • 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

Group Discussion 

• Most of the specific features 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: 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, 4Science creates a PDF export of documentation and publishes it on GitHub (large PDF, publicly and freely available); if there is a chance to have the community involved, 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
  • Tim and Holger do not know if its possibly to move the CRIS documentation to the Lyrasis wiki but will investigate
    
    • We need to first clear this on the Lyrasis side (how much would this impact cost?), then bring it to Steering 
  • Just making the 4Science wiki publicly available would not work, confluence is paid per user 

Discussion of Scenario: there is a single DSpace - DSpace CRIS community, lets assume most features of DSpace-CRIS are features DSpace needs anyway and are not CRIS specific features

• Agustina summarized last week's discussion highlights:
  • 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 institutions; this is an opportunity to take their voices into account
  • Take into account the extended use cases
  • Flexible, turn-key DSpace vs modularization 
  • Getting deeper understanding what DSpace CRIS is and try to reassure the community, focusing on the features so they know better
  • Wider issue around increased complexity of DSpace 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
  • 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
• Pierre expressed that to him, these are two completely different systems; there may be overlap, convergence of functionality of DSpace with CRIS systems; what kind of features that are clearly meant for CRIS would be brought to the community? It does have consequences. What would be the specific CRIS needs that will be brought into DSpace in the way we prioritize things?
• What is a repo? digital objects plus metadata; What is a CRIS system? A system that collects metadata about certain objects, less files
  • It comes down to managing metadata and connecting entities 
  • CRIS gives more tools do deal with the flexibility of configurable entities
  • There is more security - there is more personal data
  • Need to have hierarchical metadata
  • There is nothing specific of a funding process - not a funding system; DSpace provides the infrastructure to do this stuff
• DSpace CRIS users are very few institutions that are not research output producing institutions - significant subset of DSpace users base
  • DSpace has been growing in terms of use cases, geographical locations
  • Example: multilingual - great feature
    • How are we going to deal with this? Are we going to focus on DSpace? 
    • Difference between CRIS and DSpace: CRIS makes better use of the possibility in which language a certain metadata field is being filled out 
    • Main question is: how do we deal with DSpace opening up to other users and use cases, outside of what is the dominant use case today? How do change governance so that we can make DSpace more usable for more use cases?
• One of the most important questions: why do we want to do this merger, because CRIS seems to be a completely different system; needs to be communicated
  • There are also CRIS users that use CRIS as a repository - why?
• Merger of DSpace and DSpace-CRIS is not about restructuring the community
  • There is no feature to the best of Andrea's knowledge that only serves DSpace-CRIS and couldn't serve DSpace
• CRIS can move much faster, it's much simpler for them to implement features without the community led review process
  • PRs are too cumbersome, we are not good enough with reviews, we are not good enough with helping out, these issues need to be brought again to Steering

Next meeting

• Continue discussion; work towards list of features

Action Items

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