6 ways to improve your dspace

“With the academic year coming to a close and students having fled the library, summer is a great time to polish up your DSpace... No matter whether you are rolling up your own sleeves, engaging student workers, or teaming up with a service provider, here are 6 manageable initiatives to work on: [1] Institutional Look and Feel ... The lowest threshold in this area is customization of the header and footer area of the interface. Those zones on top and bottom of the page are identical across the repository. Updating them involves very little technical work: it can be as easy as replacing a file. If you are using graphics, make sure the aspect ratios are appropriate so the images don't appear stretched. Going a step further, armed with the knowledge of HTML color codes, you can dive into the stylesheet to make sure that all interface colors match those of your institutional website. In the XML User Interface it is also supported to do such changes on a per collection or per community basis. Going beyond this, attempting to change the structure of the pages itself, potentially adding whole new elements, really brings you in the realm of in-depth customization. Great things can be achieved here but make sure your changes are modular so they won't hinder your next DSpace upgrade. [2] Hunt for fresh content ... Given that summer has arrived, some of them are bound to be more receptive to your pleas. Knock on those doors and find out what they can give you. Browsing their webpages, Google Scholar Citations pages or publisher databases can also bear fruitful results. [3] Batch item imports ... If you are running a DSpace 1.6 or newer, item metadata can be added in batch by means of uploading a spreadsheet. So as long as you're able to get the data into a spreadsheet, you will be able to save a lot of time not having to go through the manual submission steps for each item. Working with spreadsheets also gives you an easy way to split up work between different student workers... [4] Improving your metadata quality ... The consistency of author names, affiliations or keywords are just some of the examples in which you can improve your metadata. The aforementioned Spreadsheet tool also allows you to download metadata for all items in a collection in one file, after which you can make changes and re-upload. Instead of just doing the edits in a spreadsheet editor, take a shot at doing these cleaning operations in Google refine. @mire offers a Metadata Quality add-on module for DSpace that highly increases the efficiency of batch edits and helps you to deal with duplicates as well... [5] Prepare a Dspace upgrade ... [6] Perform your Dspace upgrade ...”