DSpace Updates-12/14/18

Created by Gabe Galson
Dec 14, 2018
2 min read

Since there’s so much going on with the DSpace/Institutional Repository Project these days, this week I’m going to do a straight up updates report. To summarize: While the Services group continues to define the IR’s policy and scope, the Metadata group has nearly finalized a MAP and is working on crosswalks. Meanwhile Gabe and Chin and figuring out how to configure the system so that it can meet the two groups' needs.

IR Services-

  • The Group as a whole discussed the policy and documentation approaches assigned to two-person teams at the last meeting (Purpose, Intellectual Content, and User Communities… for more on this see last week’s post). The group came to a general consensus on how each area should be tackled. We also made a general plan for editing, collating, and standardizing the advisory text being authored by this group’s sub-teams.

  • Services Group members were assigned new areas: Preservation/Sunsetting content (@Rachel Appel (Unlicensed) ), Accessibility/ADA Compliance (@Gabe Galson ), Privacy (@Emily Toner ), Student Works (@Annie Johnson (Unlicensed) ), Rights/Copyright (@Fred Rowland (Unlicensed) ).

  • Gabe and Annie spoke to @Margery Sly (Unlicensed) about Film and Media Arts Theses. Margery gave Annie the background she needed to follow up with these materials, and hopefully pave the way for their ingestion into the IR.

IR Services Metadata-

  • The metadata group finalized an IR metadata MAP (Metadata Application Profile), which will serve as the basis of the rest of this group’s work. This was sent to the IR Services group for comment and review; It will be reviewed and approved formally at the next Services meeting).

  • Members of the IR Services group are creating several crosswalks, to be used as we ingest into our IR and migrate content from other systems. We’ll need crosswalks from CONTENTdm, ProQuest, Elements, and a direct submission form.

Technical-

  • @Holly Tomren, @Chin U. Kim, and @Gabe Galson successfully established the ProQuest to DSpace connection, successfully receiving several ETDs through the SWORDv1 protocol. Unfortunately we’ve discovered that crosswalking the metadata from such deliveries is more complicated than we thought. @Gabe Galson and @Chin U. Kim are scoping out how feasible this workflow will be.

  • Gabe is investigating system scalability, how much storage we’ll need, and how much running the system will cost yearly

  • Gabe is looking into how to configure DSpace’s metadata fields to accommodate the features the Metadata group’s requested. A quick (and incomplete) list of features under investigation:

    • Automatically assigning MIME type values based on file extension

    • Controlled vocabulary implementation and management strategies,

    • Translating field contents in the front end display (changing a two letter ISO code like ‘en’ to ‘English’ in the front end, for example).