Conference Agenda

Scientific publications repositories contribute to the access, use and reuse of information, which benefits the advent of Open Science in Brazil through the Brazilian Network of Digital Repositories (RBRD). This proposal aims to present and make available to the world the DSpace Updater Tool and its contribution to the development of RBRD, both created by the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict). Ibict is the Brazilian governmental body, which operates at the forefront of Open Science, promoting and participating in the introduction of national and international good practices, using collaborative work to promote Open Science in various services and products, highlighting in this article the creation of digital repositories in Brazilian institutions. Documentary and descriptive research was used as a methodological strategy. As a result, we found that using the tool makes it possible to install or update DSpace software quickly and pragmatically.

This talk presents the results of original research into the distribution and geolocation of installations of the institutional repository software platform DSpace. Its novelty lies in its approach in aggregating existing sources on DSpace installations, performing deduplication and by probing and scraping the installations to gain further information. Comparison between two different points in time with over a year between them will be presented to give an idea of the pace of upgrades. The major differences between versions will be explained with a focus on the security vulnerabilities of end of life versions (versions prior to 7). The talk will elaborate shortly on what the author thinks this means for the future of support, maintenance and upgrades in the community.

With DSpace 7, configurable entities were introduced. Entities were one of the major new features introduced in DSpace 7, along with the new user interface and architecture. In 2023, The Library Code completed a major migration of an institutional research repository from DSpace 6 to DSpace 7. In DSpace 6, the repository made heavy use of DSpace's authority control. It collects information about publications, student works, and research projects. We migrated the information using DSpace 7 entities and relationships, adopted and modified the DSpace 7 submission process, and integrated an external data source for information about institutional staff and students.

In this presentation, we will show what DSpace's entities can provide, how they can be used in practice, what this means for the submission process, and how you can take advantage of entities and relationships to present your information. We will discuss the approaches we took, our reasoning behind key decisions, challenges we faced during the migration, and lessons learned.

The discussion won't be highly technical, focusing on the functionality of a modern DSpace 7-based repository using entities, relationships, and the angular submission interface. The technical details will be covered in a presentation in the Developer Track of OR24.

In 2023, the Texas Digital Library upgraded its 24 DSpace repositories to DSpace 7.6. These upgrades of production repositories -- taking place between June and November 2023 -- were the culmination of many preceding months of planning, testing, documentation, and training in collaboration with TDL’s member institutions. This presentation will provide an overview of this upgrade journey, starting from a state of worry and concern over the readiness of both DSpace 7 itself and of our community to embrace this brand new user experience. Through extensive preparation and full engagement of our members in the planning and execution of the upgrades, we learned together that there was no need to worry -- or, using the Swedish expression, “There is no cow on the ice.”