DSpace at OR2024

DSpace Workshops

(Please add in a description of any workshop proposals you plan to submit to OR2024.  You are also welcome to provide a link to your proposal if you'd like others to provide feedback.)

DSpace Developer Meet-Up and Q&A

• Description: This half day workshop provides an opportunity for developers at institutions using DSpace to discuss recent DSpace releases, share what they are working on, ask questions and find collaborators.
  • NOTE: This is not a training-style workshop.  It's more of an unconference-style, meet-up opportunity for DSpace Committers and Developers to share ideas & feedback on upcoming releases and features.
• Submitted by: Tim Donohue 
• Workshop Facilitators:  Michele Mennielli , Andrea Bollini (4Science) , Art Lowel (Atmire) 
• Remote attendee: Tim Donohue 
• Proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1–4IGYUeBlMlJdqFU6DKDr5lGlPK89jm_DT3QJwHwHk/edit
• Topic Sign-Up: OR2024 DSpace Developer Meet-Up and Q&A

Creating DOIs with rich metadata using DSpace

• Description: In this workshop, DSpace administrators will learn how to enable, configure, and maximize the benefits of the DSpace 7 DataCite DOI integration. Workshop facilitators will cover the DataCite DOI registration process, the DataCite Metadata Schema, configuration options within DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, and how to customize the metadata mapping between local repository metadata and the DataCite Metadata Schema.
• Workshop Facilitators: Kelly Stathis (DataCite), Pascal-Nicolas Becker (The Library Code GmbH), Andrea Bollini (4Science), Claudio Cortese (4Science), Jordan Piščanc (4Science) & Sheila Rabun (Lyrasis)
• Audience: The audience for this workshop is repository managers, developers, administrators, and librarians who are administering DSpace repositories. The workshop is suitable for all DSpace users interested in learning about DataCite DOI registration through the platform.
• Requirements: Those interested in actively working on their configuration should have a DataCite repository test account, which can be requested in advance by emailing
• Link to Description on the OR Conference Site: https://or2024.openrepositories.org/program-registration/workshops-and-tutorials/w03/
• Slides: https://lib-co.de/or24-doi (there are more slides, but these are the ones that covers how to configure DOIs in DSpace)

DSpace Panel Discussions

(Please add in a description of any presentation proposals you plan to submit to OR2024.  You are also welcome to provide a link to your proposal if you'd like others to provide feedback.)

DSpace 8.0 and Beyond: What’s new and how a global community makes DSpace happen

• Panelists: Michele Mennielli , Andrea Bollini (4Science) , Ignace Deroost (Atmire)
• Description: This panel session will provide an update on all DSpace activities from the institutions most involved in the latest release, DSpace 8.0.  It will include updates on the 8.0 release (and other community activities) as well feature demonstrations from 4Science and Atmire.
• Submitted by: Tim Donohue
• Proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B7E-_xHof7nC0Jt7CgtZFV4ViN9Jf5-IhQKkdojkU0A/edit
• Description: This panel session will provide an update on all DSpace activities from the institutions most involved in the latest release, DSpace 8.0. DSpace 8.0 is scheduled to be released in April 2024 and follows in the footsteps of the transformative 7.x series of releases. This release prioritizes new features which empower your administrators, including a new data correction/notification service which allows DSpace to be notified of potential data quality improvements to existing research objects in the system. The panel will include demonstrations of DSpace 8 features from some of the institutions which built them. It will also provide updates from the DSpace Steering Group on the upcoming roadmap, including priorities for version 9.0 (due in April 2025) and maintenance of 7.x and 8.x. Finally, this panel will discuss current and planned DSpace community activities, along with ways that institutions can get involved or support DSpace by becoming a member or contributor.

The Repository Rodeo

• Presenters: Heather Greer Klein¹, Gustavo Durand², Rory McNicholl³, Arran Griffith⁴, Alex Ioannidis⁵, Kirsta Stapelfeldt⁶, Kristi Park⁷, Donald Moses⁸, Kate Dohe^{9 (1}Samvera, United States of America; ²Harvard University, United States of America; ³CoSector, University of London, United Kingdom; ⁴Lyrasis, United States of America; ⁵CERN, Switzerland; ⁶University of Toronto, Canada; ⁷Texas Digital Library, United States of America; ⁸University of Prince Edward Island, Canada; ⁹University of Maryland, United States of America)
• Description: The Repository Rodeo returns for another round of questions and answers! This popular panel, featured since Open Repositories 2016 in Dublin, offers a broad overview of repository platforms at Open Repositories and provides an opportunity for spirited discussion amongst panelists and attendees. Join community representatives from Dataverse, DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, InvenioRDM, Islandora, and Samvera as we briefly explain what each of our repositories actually does. We'll also talk about the directions of our respective technical and community developments and related to the conference theme of “Empowering Global Progress,” we’ll discuss the work our repository communities do to support research transparency, implement sustainable practices, and empower global progress. This panel will be a great opportunity for newcomers to Open Repositories to get a crash course on open repository options and to meet representatives from each of their communities. After a brief presentation from each representative, we'll open the session up for questions from the audience.

DSpace Presentations

(Please add in a description of any workshop proposals you plan to submit to OR2024.  You are also welcome to provide a link to your proposal if you'd like others to provide feedback.)

Authority to Entities: A DSpace 7 migration case study

• Presenters: Kim Shepherd, Pascal-Nicolas Becker (The Library Code GmbH, Germany)

• Description: DSpace 7 introduced the concept of entities and relationships which provide a way for the repository to represent many concepts in open access publishing. One of the most obvious use cases of this new framework is a way of representing the relationships between people (authors, editors, project managers) and works like publications and projects. If you are migrating from a previous version of DSpace, you might already have authority control in place. In 2023, The Library Code GmbH completed a large migration of a DSpace 6 institutional research repository to DSpace 7. A large part of this work involved the conversion of nearly 40,000 authority-controlled metadata values to entities and relationships, where institutional authors would now be represented by a Person entity with relationships to Publication and Project entities. This presentation will have a technical view on entities, relationships and data migration. We will share our experience using entities and relationships in DSpace 7. We will discuss the technical approach taken, its benefits and challenges and share the lessons learned during this project. We hope to help demystify one of DSpace’s largest new features by presenting how we achieved this large migration.

DSpace Updater Tool as a support tool for the Brazilian Digital Repository Network 

• Presenters: Tatyane Guedes Martins da Silva, Marcio Ribeiro Gurgel do Amaral, Cássio Teixeira de Morais, Marcel Garcia de Souza, Washington Luís Ribeiro de Carvalho Segundo (Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict), Brazil)

• Description: 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. 

The Distribution of DSpace

• Presenter: Hrafn Malmquist (Cottage Labs, United Kingdom)
• Description: 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.

DSpace’s entities in practice

• Presenters: Pascal-Nicolas Becker, Kim Shepherd (The Library Code GmbH, Germany)

• Description: 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.

“There’s no cow on the ice”: How we learned to stop worrying and love DSpace 7

• Presenters: Kristi L. Park, Nicholas Woodward (Texas Digital Library, United States of America)
• Description: 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.”   

Rethinking Digital Libraries Paradigms: moving Digital Cultural Heritage Collections to DSpace 7/8

• Presenters: Andrea Bollini, Claudio Cortese, Andrea Barbasso, Irene Buso, Riccardo Fazio, Damiano Fiorenza, Giuseppe Digilio, Benedetta Gandolini, Emilia Groppo, Stefano Maffei, Vincenzo Mecca, Susanna Mornati, Luigi Andrea Pascarelli, Immacolata Scancarello, Francesco Pio Scognamiglio, Federico Verlicchi, (4Science, Italy)
• Description: The release of DSpace 7 with all the new technologies and features it implements, represents a momentous change, opening up the application to new and broader perspectives. In particular, it makes the product much more attractive to the cultural heritage domain. As a result, several organizations are starting to implement or migrating Digital Libraries to DSpace 7 or to the most recent version 8. Based on 4Science's experience in managing more than twenty DSpace-based Cultural Heritage projects, this contribution aims to present the challenges of starting a Digital Library based on DSpace, both from scratch or migrating data. The presentation will also illustrate how creating a DSpace-based Digital Library can take such applications to the next level, allowing to explore and analyze documents in relation to other documents and to all the information helping to define their context, or rather their different contexts (historical , geographical, cultural, etc.) and providing tools to communicate digital cultural heritage in different ways for different audiences.

Empowering DSpace users and administrators: What is being done and where do we continue from here?

• Presenter: Tel Ayalon (World Bank, United States of America)
• Description: User empowerment has been one of the key areas of focus recommended in a report by the Product Visioning Working Group, which is part of the DSpace Leadership Group run by Lyrasis. The Working Group put an emphasis on enabling DSpace users to get more out of their repositories while avoiding outsourcing functions to a vendor or hiring a technical expert. In this session I will demonstrate how the World Bank implements end-user empowering functionality, as well as repository management empowerment measures, present and future.

Using a DSpace 7 Upgrade as an Outreach Opportunity

• Presenter: Colleen Lyon (University of Texas at Austin, United States of America)
• Description: Repositories with policies that allow users to submit content may save time in processing submissions, but do introduce issues with maintaining lines of communication with all submitters. As repositories grow in size, keeping track of all individuals and units who are using the repository can become difficult. Repository managers need to balance the frequency and length of communication in order to not overwhelm or annoy recipients. This presentation will outline the communication strategy related to a recent DSpace 7 upgrade for a large repository (more than 100,000 items). The presenter will share the communication plan related to the software upgrade, some of the tools that are used to keep track of communication with individual collections and users, and feedback from user surveys related to library support of the repository.

Understanding and using the ORCID integration in DSpace and DSpace-CRIS

• Presenter: Oliver Goldschmidt (TU Hamburg, Germany)
• Description: PIDs like ORCID or DOI can be considered as the probably most important pillars to empower global progress to repository systems. Today any repository software should have a working ORCID integration to help the users to distinguish persons on a global level and another persistent identifier to address publications. The well-known repository software DSpace has a working integration of ORCID, which has been introduced in DSpace 7.3 (June 2022). But even in the currently latest version DSpace 7.6 it’s still not complete. DSpace-CRIS is a software, which is very much tied to DSpace, but it’s a standalone software. It is developed by 4Science and is containing a complete ORCID integration for a long time. Hamburg University of Technology recently conducted a project in cooperation with 4Science, which was funded by ORCID in context of the Global Participation Fund. The project's goal was to improve the login process against ORCID for DSpace-CRIS. This presentation will focus on the project results, but it will also show, how the ORCID integration in DSpace-CRIS and DSpace can be used at all. It will also explain the differences of the integration levels between DSpace and DSpace-CRIS and compare the two platforms regarding their ORCID integration.

From Invenio1 to DSpace7: Sustainability of an Institutional Repository in Practice

• Presenters: Hana Vyčítalová, Petra Černohlávková, David Gerner (National Library of Technology, Czech Republic)
• Description: The National Library of Technology (NTK) has operated its institutional repository for publications and other outputs for over ten years on the open-source platform Invenio 1. With a lack of technical staff over the years, the maintenance of the repository was getting more and more complicated. By 2022, the situation was no longer sustainable, and we had to face difficult choices. To ensure the repository's sustainability, it was necessary to change the software and process the data migration. We chose DSpace 7 as it meets our requirements well. Nevertheless, there are only a few implementations of DSpace 7 so far, none of them in the Czech Republic (only version 6). In all circumstances, it meant many challenges and mistakes during the DSpace 7 implementation. Our experience with the sustainability of a repository on a short budget is very fresh. We want to share it with the community, so our mistakes don’t have to be repeated. The contribution briefly describes the NTK repository context and shares the challenges and mistakes we made while implementing the chosen solution.

Migrate DSpace from 5x to 7x - How do we did it in our national open access service at RCAAP

• Presenters: Paulo Graça¹, Fernando Ribeiro¹, Raquel Truta², Ricardo Saraiva², Paulo Lopes¹  (¹FCT|FCCN, Portugal; ²University of Minho)
• Description: The RCAAP network, crucial for promoting Open Science in Portugal, includes the Institutional Repository Hosting Service (SARI), which hosts 28 repositories. Facing the challenge of migrating from DSpace 5.x to DSpace 7.x, the process unfolded in phases. The creation of DSpace 7++, incorporating additional integrations, marked the initial step. A pilot project involving two institutions refined the migration process. With a focus on improved user interfaces, recent technologies, customization, and new integrations, DSpace 7.x was chosen. Despite compromises and acknowledged usability issues, the migration aimed to align with the community's needs. The ongoing evolution prioritizes aspects adding value to what DSpace delivers within the broader scientific ecosystem. Notably, lessons learned emphasize the significance of constant improvement and prioritization of features aligned with community needs

DSpace Minute Madness & Poster Sessions

(Please add in a description of any workshop proposals you plan to submit to OR2024.  You are also welcome to provide a link to your proposal if you'd like others to provide feedback.)

The Road From DSpace 6 to DSpace 7 and Beyond: Building (and Building on) Two Modern Digital Repositories at Rice University

• Presenters: Ying Jin, John Mulligan, Kenneth Evans (Rice University, United States of America)
• Description: In October 2023, the Digital Scholarship Services team in Fondren Library at Rice University upgraded its digital repository. The process was both challenging, rewarding, and instructive for our future work on digital collections. We took a mixed approach in which 27% of our content was moved to Quartex, which could be curated as digital cultural heritage, 11% was retired, and the remainder migrated from the DSpace 6.4 system to the new 7.6 deployment. We are now using our two new platforms’ API’s to enable a microservices-based approach to customized UI presentations for special collections, and semi-automatic metadata enrichment, and document submission workflows. This poster describes our preliminary attempts in this space on two collections: geo-located photographs of Chinese subway advertisements over two decades and the geographically dispersed papers relating to the United States’ President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Querying DSpace: An AI Powered Conversation Application using RAG with Langchain

• Presenters: Zhongda Zhang¹, Le Yang²  (¹University of Oklahoma, United States of America; ²University of Oregon, United States of America
• Description: AI has the potential to significantly impact open access repository development landscape in various ways like enabling better search, content recommendation, identifying new patterns in scholarly content, and promoting openness in datasets and content. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as crucial and widely used resources in the field of natural language processing, which is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) and shares common ground with machine learning (ML). LLMs allow computers to comprehend and produce text in a manner that resembles human communication. Our goal during the experiment was to create a conversation application that integrates OpenAI to query DSpace using natural language processing (NLP). We explored technologies such as LLMs, OpenAI API, LangChain, embeddings, and vector stores. LLMs are deep learning models trained on large datasets. The OpenAI API provides a cloud interface for accessing OpenAI's machine learning models. LangChain is an AI framework for language-based applications. Embeddings encode information in high-dimensional vector spaces. Vector stores are databases that store vector embeddings of non-numerical data. To create better responses, we used retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to incorporate additional, real-time data from DSpace. This allows us to explore the most up-to-date data in DSpace.

The ORCID integration into DSpace and DSpace-CRIS

• Presenter: Oliver Goldschmidt (TU Hamburg)
• Description: PIDs like ORCID or DOI can be considered as the probably most important pillars to empower global progress to repository systems. Today any repository software should have a working ORCID integration to help the users to distinguish persons on a global level and another persistent identifier to address publications. The well-known repository software DSpace has a working integration of ORCID, which has been introduced in DSpace 7.3 (June 2022). But even in the currently latest version DSpace 7.6 it’s still not complete. DSpace-CRIS is a software, which is very much tied to DSpace, but it’s a standalone software and an institution has to choose whether to use DSpace or DSpace-CRIS. DSpace-CRIS is maintained and developed by 4Science and is containing a complete ORCID integration for a long time. Hamburg University of Technology recently conducted a project in cooperation with 4Science, which was funded by ORCID in context of the Global Participation Fund. The project had the goal to improve the login process against ORCID for DSpace-CRIS. This poster will illustrate the ORCID integrations of DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, focusing on the results of the login improvement project.