Conference Agenda

DSpace-CRIS is the first open source CRIS/RIMS platform in the world. It was born with the idea to put the repository at the core of the information ecosystem of Universities and with the ambition to bring utmost prestige and value to adopting institutions. Other approaches, usually promoted by communities less supportive to the open world, CRIS systems put the Repository to a side, subtracting resources, duplicating efforts and creating competing projects. Since its first release as open source, the Open Repository conference has represented a pivotal date in the year to look at the new achievements and future direction of the DSpace-CRIS project and its large user base of hundreds of installations around the world: this year,the DSpace-CRIS new developments since OR2022 and the updated project roadmap will be presented highlighting the relation with the parent DSpace project and the possible convergences.

In DSpace 7 User Interface development the initial focus was on replicating existing, pre-DSpace 7, features. While performance was taken into account for the development of individual features, it was not sufficiently covered from the perspective of DSpace as a whole. Given the End-of-life of DSpace 5 & 6 there was a need for swift structural performance optimization. In this presentation we elaborate on the performance issues that were encountered in DSpace 7, the possible solutions, and the remedies that are already developed, or that will likely be developed in the future. This presentation also briefly touches upon the importance of careful selection of custom development by decision makers.

DSpace 7.x (first released on Aug 2, 2021) has rejuvenated the DSpace platform, introducing a new User Interface (based on Angular.io) backed by a new REST API. This new REST API provides not only the backbone to DSpace, but also opens its data to a world of future integrations.

As we approach the second anniversary of 7.0, we are nearing feature compatibility between DSpace 5.x/6.x and the new 7.x platform. With 7.6, due in June 2023, we anticipate that the 7.x platform will be nearly (or fully) “feature complete”.

This presentation will discuss the 7.6 release, the upcoming roadmap for DSpace 7.x, and early ideas for what may come in 8.x. Now that our 7.x rebuild is nearing completion, we’ll reflect on how 7.x was achieved through community-based funding (Membership, Development Fund, SCOSS, partnerships with Service Providers) along with donated code contributions. We’ll also look to the future, and discuss how everyone has the opportunity to take part in our DSpace Governance to plan the next features for 8.x and beyond.

At the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Library (UTSC) the Digital Scholarship Unit (DSU) a small, core technical team is tasked with developing and managing an infrastructure that supports multiple, diverse digital collections and digital scholarship projects. It is a constant challenge to meet the diverse needs of faculty partners and researchers without amassing unmanageable technical debt in the form of highly-individualized web applications that can cause challenges for maintenance and web-archiving longer-term. A decade-long collaboration between digital-humanities researcher and historian Dr. Natalie Rothman (UTSC Professor and Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies) and Kirsta Stapelfeldt (Librarian and Head of the DSU) for the Dragoman Renaissance Research platform has provided many opportunities for tackling the challenges of online interoperability, sustainability, and addressing complex research needs with limited resources. By prioritizing robust, iterative data modelling and core research and presentation functions over bespoke interfaces, the project aims to provide ample opportunities for data querying and reuse, while limiting long-term maintenance challenges. This presentation introduces the Islandora-based infrastructure at the UTSC’s DSU and presents key features that may be of use to others tasked with supporting and stewarding an increasing number of online digital scholarship projects with limited resources.