Follow-up post regarding DSpace 1.5 adoption

I strongly encourage readers of the CARL IR post below to view Mark Diggory’s comment.  He discusses migration from DSpace 1.4 to DSpace 1.5.  He’s made a good point: in presenting perceptions of IR meeting attendees without further elaboration I may lead readers to make conclusions that are not entirely accurate.

I agree with Mark’s comments and to add to his case would like to share our migration story.

Our migration to DSpace 1.5 was delayed because of other pressing projects and the fact that we were upgrading our server environment. The actual migration from DSpace 1.4 to 1.5 was rather quick.  It took us only a few weeks to pilot the migration on the test server,  present the test version to our user communities, integrate suggestions, and run the actual upgrade.  When we showed the upgrade to our users on our test environment, their suggestions were related to our new design, and not DSpace functionality itself.

I am a fan of DSpace 1.5’s integration of selecting a Creative Commons licence at the point of item submission. (This feature alone is worth the upgrade!) The Manakin interface has enabled us to create custom submission templates and to easily display customized searching and browsing capabilities.

Finally, my observations should be taken in balance with the reality that many IR managers are pulled in multiple other directions such as faculty liaison, policy development, advocacy for open access, and digital projects such as journal publishing initiatives.  Repository management is only one aspect of their daily work, and as a result, time is short.  Finding the time to explore new features and carefully plan migrations is increasingly short, and this is likely the overarching factor that precipitates slower adoption.