2023-08-09 DSpace Leadership Group Meeting

Date

09 Aug 2023 11:00-1:00 Eastern Daylight Time

Zoom:

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Meeting ID: 502 527 3040

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Leadership Group Members

• Nada Mahmoud Aboueata, Qatar University
  
• Laurie Gemmill Arp Lyrasis
• Tal Ayalon World Bank Group
• Pascal-Nicolas Becker The Library Code
• Isabel Bernal Spanish National Research Council CSIC
  
• Jose Carvalho KEEP Solutions**
• Kimberly Chapman University of Arizona Libraries (Ex-officio, DCAT Chair)
• Corey Davis, University of Victoria Libraries
• Lieven Droogmans Atmire*
  
• Victor Gomez CONCYTEC
• Barbara Hirschmann ETH Zurich 
• Jyrki Ilva National Library of Finland 
• Erica Johns Cornell University
  
• Joanna Lee George Mason University  
  
• Agustina Martinez-Garcia University of Cambridge* 
• Tim McGeary  Duke University Libraries   
• Erik Moore University of Minnesota*
• Susanna Mornati (4Science)*
• Jere Odell  IUPUI*
• Susan Wells Parham Georgia Institute of Technology
• Kristi Park Texas Digital Library*
• Jussi Piipponen FinELib-consortium
• Beate Rajski DSpace-Konsortium Deutschland
• Bronwen Sprout The University of British Columbia
• Maureen Walsh The Ohio State University Libraries* (Chair) 

Lyrasis attendees

• Tim Donohue 
• Michele Mennielli 

The  represents who will be taking notes for a given meeting. It rotates after each meeting to the next person in the attendee list.

*Members of DSpace Steering Group

**Community At Large Representative

***Ex-officio member nominated by the Leadership Group as representative of the community at large. Ex-officio members do not have voting rights

Agenda

Notes

Welcome

• Last meeting of the fiscal year
• Last meeting for Maureen Walsh as chair

Financial Report

• Full report distributed to leadership but not included in wiki as it is public
• Budget is a plan; end of fiscal year is a time to reflect on that plan
• Overall slightly ahead – Generous and increased contributions
• Variances
  • Positive:
    • Higher revenue of dues and contributions
  • Negative:
    • Service provider fees (pilot year) and consultants (in part due to shifting of SCOSS expenses)
  • SCOSS – 3 year pledge campaign
    • A little over $200K pledged
    • $96,000 to work with for SCOSS expenses
  • Available assets for general purpose: $66,845
  • Cash category = Net Assets + (Liability – Accounts Receivable)
  • Questions / Comments:
    • We were able to fund the 7.x development w/o needing to use the line of credit offered by Lyrasis. This is good to see.
    • https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/Announcement%3A+DSpace+Development+Fund
    • https://lyrasisnow.org/your-generous-support-is-accelerating-dspace-7/
    • Agreed this is impressive, and an opportunity to consider whether to increase reserve funds for future
    • We were in the red for DSpace 7.5, and several organizations stepped up to fund the development and get DSpace out of the red for DSpace 7.6

Membership and Governance

• Renewals and Memberships
  • Over $300,000 in memberships committed
  • We can go forward with nominations process
  • 12 SCOSS contributions - $75,000
  • Another $35,000 in contributions for DSpace Development Fund
  • Only four institutions did not renew yet
  • Two new members will be joining January 2024
  • This does not include Service Provider Program

Registered Service Providers (RSP) Pilot

• Pilot year
• Goals:
  • Get RSPs more engaged
  • Increase transparency
  • Have RSPs more involved in technical development of DSpace
• Assessment is all goals have been achieved
• Last year – 21 RSPs
• Pilot – 10 RSPs
• Previously, 21 RSPs provided $50,000 to DSpace
• In the pilot, the 10 RSPs provided 60,000 to DSpace
• The pilot increased the fee and created 3 tiers, including adding an in-kind contribution that would be tied to reducing financial contribution at the end of the year. Over 4,000 hours of in-kind contributions, which translates to $240,000 of equivalent financial contribution. Combined with the $60,000 in financial contribution, this equals $300,000 in value of total contributions
• RSP pilot members can highlight their values of commitment to DSpace as an open source
• This pilot also motivated some RSPs who were inactive previously to be more active
• Publishing activity on the wiki also allows the community to check and validate what the RSPs are contributing and spent time assessing and evaluating this process for accuracy and consistency
• Steering Group will be reviewing recommendations for formalizing Program to continue
• Questions / Comments:
  • None

DSpace Grant Work

• Letter submitted to Mellon Foundation and awaiting response
• Letter describes general summary of intention
• If accepted, a full proposal is next stage.

Program Coordinator Role and Next Steps

• Natalie has vacated position
• SCOSS funds this position
• Goal was to grow this into full time position, but SCOSS funding was less than goal (FT coordinator and junior developer)
• $96,000 in SCOSS funding
• Options:
  • Part time role is difficult
  • We may have funds to hire FTE for full year but no funding beyond that
  • Could we hire a term position? Retention is difficult
  • Consulting option, though there is value for coordinator to already be embedded in the DSpace community
  • Could a member institution have a staff member serve in this role as an in person contribution? What level would this need to be? Could we build this as a professional development opportunity? Such as a Visiting Program Officer role?
• Questions/Comments:
  • Given that we do not have enough money for a Community Manager for a full year, perhaps it is better to hire a freelance junior developer looking for part time development work? Appreciate the role of the community manager, but based on the financial situation, perhaps the development priority is more actionable.
  • Also consider ways to better support Tim Donohue.
  • Laurie acknowledges that SCOSS Funding may not allow contract work.
  • Laurie shares that if a member wants to contribute in-kind, SCOSS funding to complement.
  • If a member institution is interested in exploring, reach out to Maureen or Laurie
  • Concern about members who are not in this call – if this is a plan to move forward, so should this be a call to the community to include members who do not get to participate in Steering or Leaders. Do we start with this group? If no one responds from this group, does that make this less feasible? Or should we start with a call to the community?
  • The notes of Leaders are public, and the more people who can read and know about these needs and opportunities, the better.
  • A lot of in-kind contributions in the past year are not technical: Communication, Marketing, Webinars, user groups organization, etc.

Development Update

• 7.6 was released and is feature complete. It will move into maintenance mode as 7.6.x for maintenance releases only. No date set for 7.6.1 release, but bug fixes are currently being approved, but will be released in fall.
• 8.0

• Tentative release date April 2024 (April will be planned for major release every year in future)
• Scaled down feature set and focus on community/operations/roadmapping
  • COAR Notify support (4Science & Harvard)
  • OpenAIRE integration with notification broker/claim service (4Science)
  • Porting "REST-Based Quality Control Reports" from old REST API to new one. (U of Laval, Canada)
  • Duplicate Detection in Submission ported from DSpace-CRIS (The Library Code)
• Include features that missed DSpace 7.6 if possible
• Include a few features to increase control through admin UI
• Improve documentation and training to allow for greater community contributions.
• Proof of concepts (happening concurrently with DSpace 8.0 development but may not be included in DSpace 8.0 release)
• Modularization of User Interface (4Science proposal to use an Angular library-based architecture)
• OCFL work (Lyrasis proposal to add digital preservation friendly storage)

• Questions / Comments:
  • What is the overall goal for this POC proposal? It is to make it more interoperable with preservation systems or accomplish preservation itself or something else?
    • This is a goal from the new Lyrasis CEO to be interoperable with preservation systems and be able accomplish basic preservation tasks on its own.
    • Including block storage capability so that the content could be visible without needing to use DSpace in the future to preserve the objects rather than having to preserve DSpace in its entirety.
    • Members are welcome to add comments to the Google Doc linked above. This is still at the brainstorm level.
  • Steering has discussed evaluating functionality that is only in DSpace 6 to carry into DSpace 8 with the caveat that would require volunteer hours - Community and collection level searching, as an example
    • Were unintentionally left off the list above.
    • Anything overlooked that was not brought from 6 to 7 can be added if someone volunteers or commits funding explicitly for the work.
  • Multi-lingual user interface, specifically more fluent support has been discussed before and is a struggle to members.
    • It would be good to capture any problems in tickets, as there was nothing specifically mentioned to focus on.
      • Managing Collection names in several languages, is an example
    • This can be revisited in next Steering meeting

Community Events updates

• Africa ArXiv – they run a comparative analysis of vendor and open repositories in conjunction with UbuntuNet to plan for a possible continental repository as a central repository. They are not seeking any contributions from DSpace, but coordination and potential contributions to DSpace, as there are four developers assigned for this project.
  • AfricArXiv (https://info.africarxiv.org/) is the leading organization for building up the portal;
  • the event in Uganda is the annual conference of UbuntuNet
    https://ubuntunet.net/uc2023/
• DSpace 7.6 Q&A
  • Questions were more oriented with specific issues after the upgrade or during upgrade planning. More help oriented rather than information gathering, as in previous Q&A’s. Demonstrates momentum towards active migrations to 7.6

New DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) Chair

• Kimberly Chapman, University of Arizona
• Ex officio, not voting member of Leaders
• Update:
  • Seeking to fill role of vice chair
  • Focus theme for year:
    • Defined annual by DCAT and Steering
    • Last year was Year of DSpace 7. Next year will likely be Year of DSpace 8. But this year could likely be focused on Community Engagement
  • Documentation: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/Learning+DSpace
    • Also need to think about when to stop with DSpace 7 documentation and move to DSpace 8
  • DSpace 8 Test-a-thon time frame
  • UX testing, different from bug reporting – is it feasible to include with test-a-thon?
  • Is accessibility scanning automated or is part of testing?
    • Not automated beyond scanning tools, which is not perfect and doesn’t run on every single page
    • No funding for accessibility expertise
    • Treated as bugs presently, and fixed as quickly as possible
    • TDL and Lyrasis did fund hiring an accessibility consulting review
    • An accessibility issue Cornell’s accessibility lead saw in our dspace 7.6 instance was some accessibility issues with keyboard nav and drop-downs (main nav seems fine - more in-page issue)

From the Community

• World Bank
  • Possibility of resuming North American DSpace user group conferences
    • Univ of Minnesota hosted in 2019 and would support reviving of NA user group
  • DSpace7, Angular 2 and across the board decline in repository usage statistics
    • One issue was a bug that was discovered and should be fixed in 7.6.1
    • Second issue is Angular UI is tougher on bot activity getting through defenses – this is a good thing, but raises questions about consistency of usage statistics
    • Another issue is Google indexing with Google Scholar
      • Tim D is in touch with Google Scholar team
    • Constant URLs for bitstreams – should they make a comeback?
      • Old bitstreams links will work, but new links starting in 7.0 forward will not work. Versioning does not help with this.
      • This could be something to seek volunteer to develop to bring from v6 to v8.