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.

CARL IR Meeting at Access 2008

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries hosed an Institutional Repository meeting in Hamilton Ontario on Wednesday October 1st, 2008 to coincide with Access 2008, and I was happy to be in attendance.

This was an extremely worthwhile meeting where participants were able to trade stories of their successes, challenges, and plans for the future. With over 40 of us in the room, it took almost the entire duration of the meeting to do a round of introductions discussing individual repositories. I sincerely hope that this becomes an annual event!

There were three major themes that emerged from the meeting:

Theme 1 – DSpace is commonly used, most institutions running 1.4 version

Most of the repositories in attendance were hosted using DSpace software.  I was very surprised to hear that most of the DSpace hosted repositories were versions of the 1.4 release, and that only two institutions had migrated to the 1.5 release.  I was slightly relieved because we finally completed our migration to 1.5 and I thought that we were behind!

As a result, the Manakin XML interface layer for DSpace was also not being used.  We were the only ones to have a production version of Manakin running.

Reasons cited for not migrating to 1.5 included:

• customizations made to DSpace 1.4 will take a lot of programming time to move over to 1.5
• certain plug-ins and enhancements that are in heavy use in 1.4 have not yet been made available for 1.5
• administrators are evaluating other platforms and are not willing to invest the time in upgrading to 1.5 if they end up switching platforms
• programmers are hard to find, train and retain

Please visit my follow-up post to this section that elaborates on these observations.

Theme 2 – Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

ETDs were discussed at length as they are very popular and make up a sizable percentage of most Canadian repository content.  Only one institution has mandated electronic thesis deposit, but many have effective relationships with their respective Graduate Faculties where procedures have been established to enable the depositing of theses into repositories on an ongoing basis.

Copyright has been tackled in many ways: seeking legal advice from campus legal counsel, sending letters to alumni, taking out an ad in institutional alumni magazines, and re-writing agreements to be signed by current graduates.

The availability of past Proquest theses were discussed but common problems were echoed:  poor quality scans for certain year ranges, Proquest marc records not tying to digital copies of theses by filename, lack of ocr, and the need to remove signature pages have slowed down workflow to ingest these items.

Theme 3 – Scholarly Communications Programs

Many of the participating institutions are hosting outreach programs to discuss Scholarly Communications challenges with faculty.  Efforts include hosting speaker events and creating websites/supporting materials.

The DSpace Course

Congratulations to the JISC-funded Repositories Support Project for The DSpace Course initiative!  A colleague brought this to my attention today and I immediately took a look.

The DSpace course is a set of 20 modules that can be used to create a custom course.  Released with a creative commons “by-attribution share-alike” license, both pdfs and powerpoint/word files are released for easy remixing and resue.

The course modules cover topics such as configuration, customization and management.  It is an incredibly valuable training resource, especially for new hires that have the skills but are not familiar with DSpace.  It will save me weeks of training time in the future by quickly demystifying DSpace and making it more approachable.  To further enhance the learning experience, an accompanying live CD has also been released which allows DSpace to be run and used without having to install it on a server.

My thanks to Stuart Lewis and Chris Yates for all their hard work. My printer is humming in the background as I’m looking forward to ploughing through the course on my home commute.