We, at DSpace, want to take a moment and personally thank you for your continued and generous support of our program and community. It is because of the support of our member institutions that open technologies, like us, can continue to provide access to our collective educational, scientific and cultural materials. Your financial support ensures that we can continue delivering the DSpace application to its worldwide user-base and grow and expand the thriving community behind it. As a DSpace Member you have a voice in ensuring that we can serve the global communities that depend on our software to protect and preserve the priceless content contained within their repositories now and into the future.
As you know, DSpace is part of Lyrasis, a technology nonprofit that is home to five open source software communities. By being a part of Lyrasis, DSpace is able to leverage cost savings via shared infrastructure, new staff and expertise with a larger team, and increased investments in development and outreach.
The membership invoicing process has started and our Membership team has reached out to confirm your details. Even though your invoice will arrive shortly, all of your 2024-2025 membership benefits will continue through June 30 and the new term will start on July 1, just as always.
Membership represents DSpace's main source of unrestricted income and provides essential support for our staff and operations. If you would like to have a conversation about your DSpace membership renewal, or have any concerns about continuing your membership, please contact us at membership@lyrasis.org. We're here to help. We look forward to working with you during the upcoming membership year.
The high-level summary below describes some of the accomplishments made possible by your membership contribution, as well as what you can expect in the coming year. If you missed it, please see our Annual Report for FY 2023 which highlights more exciting things that your membership dollars helped to accomplish.
DSpace FY 2023/24 Activities Supported by Membership
New features and enhancements on the DSpace platform including:
- DSpace 7.6 - Enhancements including advanced policy management, item counts (per collection), primary bitstream support, signposting and more.
- DSpace 7.6.1 - Performance improvements and bug fixes to the 7.6 platform.
- DSpace 8.0 (coming in May) - Support for COAR Notify, OpenAIRE data correction & publication claim, basic duplicate detection, request for withdrawal and many other major enhancements.
- Weekly Developers meetings and extensive coordination on DSpace development
- DSpace conducted a successful fundraising campaign to accelerate improved accessibility, raising $ 20,000 thus far thanks to the generous contributions of member institutions.
Supporting the program with staff positions:
- Tim Donohue, DSpace Technical Lead: Tim coordinates community participation in the open source development process.
- Michele Mennielli, Sr Global Strategist: Michele works 20% of his time to support national representatives worldwide, coordinate User Group activities and increase global membership and engagement.
- Holger Lenz, DSpace Program Coordinator: Holger contributes 20 hours per week to support Governance, Membership, and Outreach activities.
Responding to the needs of our community:
- In Feb 2023, DSpace Governance announced that DSpace 7 was nearing feature parity with prior releases (v6, v5). Once DSpace 7 reached that parity (accomplished with 7.6), version 7 moved into maintenance mode and planning for DSpace 8 began. DSpace 8 will mark a return to yearly major releases and is therefore scheduled in mid 2024.
- DSpace is part of one of the 3 open-source programs into the SCOSS 3rd funding cycle, aimed at supporting the fundraising for long term sustainability of the program. Fundraising is ongoing and so far, has allowed hiring of a part time Program Coordinator role.
- We provided our webinar tools to DSpace user groups for organizing training and sessions for their communities.
Coming for DSpace and Our Community in FY 2024
- Quarterly DSpace Newsletter
- An expanded slate of live, virtual community events
Many opportunities to connect with fellow DSpace users virtually:
- You can contribute to the DSpace Development Fund
- Certified Service Providers funded to do development for community
- Priorities decided by Steering/Leadership
- Contribute code, review or test in DSpace 7 Working Group
- Contribute to “Learning DSpace” / discussions in DCAT
- Help market DSpace in DSpace Marketing Interest Group
- Join (or create) your local DSpace User Group
- Try out DSpace 7 : https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/Try+out+DSpace+7
- In collaboration and with the support of national user groups coordinators we are working on the translation and production of content and documentation in different languages.
- We are planning to strengthen the collaboration with the National User Groups to provide the right support and information around the new DSpace releases.