Improving Dspace Together

“A mix of 30 DSpace veterans, new faces, developers and repository managers sat together at the dawn of the Open Repositories conference in Edinburgh for fruitful discussions on tackling current DSpace issues and improving the ways how the DSpace community collaborates. @mire's Mark Diggory, Kevin Van de Velde and Bram Luyten attended the day. August 17th has been set as the feature freeze date for the DSpace 3.0 release. This means that this is the date by when interested contributors have to make their source code available for evaluation by others, prior to be included in the actual 3.0 release... In 2012, the development of DSpace has migrated from Subversion to Github, a more advanced solution for software version control. Based on practices at ThinkUp, @mire's Mark Diggory illustrated the new process to contribute changes and improvements to DSpace... Jonathan Markow, Duraspace's Chief Strategy Officers highlighted the importance of aligning requirements and pooling together resources in the forms of developer & repository manager time and funding, to tackle the bigger infrastructural development challenges. It can sound unlikely that your institution wants to step up as the next MIT, who co-created the creation of the original DSpace software with HP, to take on a sizeable commitment to the development of the platform. However, sizable development goals can be reached if different institutions who face the same functional challenges, align their requirements and pool resources together. At @mire we already see this today in projects where we have collaborated with different institutions on infrastructural open source contributions like Advanced DSpace embargo and Item Versioning. Markow indicated that Duraspace aims to play a more active role in this process under the flag of ‘Managed Projects’ ... In a closing Blue Sky discussion led by Richard Rodgers, there was a shared enthusiasm about several areas in which DSpace could be leveraged in the mid and long term future. Stuart Lewis was particularly upbeat about additional features for digital preservation, stating that all necessary hooks were present to include emerging standards JHOVE and PRONOM. Different institutions have been using DSpace to manage research data, for which the support will already be improved once the new Item Versioning feature arrives in DSpace 3.0. Lastly, several people were convinced that DSpace and the community have what it takes to offer more functionality in the area of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). CILEA, an Italian DSpace service provider will be contributing a separate CRIS module for DSpace after the 3.0 release.”