2024-02-21 DSpace Leadership Group Meeting

Date

21 Feb 2024 11:00-1:00 Eastern Time

Zoom:

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android:https://lyrasis.zoom.us/j/9963190968 

Meeting ID: 502 527 3040

Passcode: dspace

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Meeting ID: 502 527 3040

Passcode: 995571

Find your local number: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/u/aoVg8CoUw

Leadership Group Members

• Laurie Gemmill Arp Lyrasis*
• Tal Ayalon World Bank Group
• Pascal-Nicolas Becker The Library Code*
• Isabel Bernal Spanish National Research Council CSIC
  
• Bill Branan John Hopkins University
• Kimberly Chapman University of Arizona Libraries (Ex-officio, DCAT Chair)
• Lieven Droogmans Atmire*
• Scott Hanrath  University of Kansas
• 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* 
• Erik Moore University of Minnesota*
• Susanna Mornati (4Science)*
• Jere Odell  IUPUI*
• Alan Orth  International Livestock Research Institute, Kenya**
• Susan Wells Parham Georgia Institute of Technology
• Kristi Park Texas Digital Library*
• Beate Rajski DSpace-Konsortium Deutschland
• Ianthe Sutherland University of Edinburgh
• Maureen Walsh The Ohio State University Libraries*

Lyrasis attendees

• Tim Donohue

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

Fundraising updates

Targeted funding accessibility ask with the Development Fund

Update on financial activities DDF:

• Launched mini campaign in the fall focused on accessibility compliance for D7 - fund paid development to improve it
• Prioritised by governance
• Focus on DSpace 7 but available in DSpace 8 and beyond
• To date raised 20,000$ via the listed organisations
• Discussions at Steering taking place re how to best utilise those funds
• Developing guidance to help institutions contributing to this
• Special campaign for accessibility contributions ends June 1

Q: How does membership allocation to dedicated/specific work?

A: For new members this is allowed in cases where it helps getting approval at their institutions. Other alternative is for existing members to increase their membership on a one-time basis with the overage earmarked to the development fund.

Financials

Quarterly Financial Report: Oct 1, 2023-Dec 31, 2023

Notes:

• Overall, it is positive to FY23-23 budget (financial plan) at half way point of fiscal year
• Fund raising on track for the year
• SCOSS currently under due to their billing requirements - build up as it has not been used so far (planned to be spent on hiring the community manager)
• Close to what was estimated for the year; end of the year is where we really get a sense of where we are

Q: Timings on budgeting for next year?

A: Hoping to have a draft for Steering to look at in March

Development

DSpace 7

Accessibility priorities

DSpace Development Fund accessibility campaign funding prioritization approved by Steering:

• Accessibility priorities: re-prioritisation has taken place (full re-analysis originally planned will be replaced with other activities - development work on fixes and enhancing automated testing in the DSpace app). Unused funding can go to partial/full re-analysis work
• Plea for institutions conducting internal accessibility audits to share their results, preferably as issue tickets
• Updated accessibility statement for DSpace will be available soon - revamping it and enhancing documentation (e.g. how to report accessibility issues)
• Thanks to contributors for their donated fixes that DSpace 8.0 development has received (ported to DSpace 7.x)

DSpace 8.0

• Work on prioritised main features is going as planned
• More details available in 8.0 Status page and 8.0 Project board
• Shift in release schedule to mid-May 2024 due to critical work on major dependency updates for both backend and frontend (Java and angular)
  •    Testathon shifted to April 1-12
• Importance of emphasising that a lot of (hidden) work in this release has gone into maintenance. Lots of bug fixes also included in this release
• Ongoing work on testathon documentation is taking place

Breakouts 

State of Repositories

Topics suggested by Leadership members:

• Cyber security
• Compliance - federal/funder mandates (e.g. open access)
• Impact tracking - Reporting on repositories
• Discoverability of repositories
• Catch up with developments in the Scholarly ecosystem - diamond OA, COAR notify
• Increased harvesting/indexing/bots affecting performance and statistics
  • Large Language Models (LLMs) training for AI purposes
  • Big performance issues at the infrastructure end. It is not a DSpace software issue
  • Good bots changing behaviours in terms crawl rates
  • Impact of AI Bots
  • Concerns around bots / harvesters not respecting content licensing, CORE was mentioned
• Expanded uses of repositories, beyond traditional uses such as collection management
• Increased costs of supporting the repository infrastructure
  • Equity of access
• Taking advantage of AI technologies
  • AI and accessibility: improving our content in terms of accessibility
  • AI tools: automated metadata translation
• Enhancing DSpace support for handling large content. Many DSpace repositories are increasingly taking research datasets.

Governance

Steering Updates

Steering Governance Task Force

• First action: Draft a charge for Steering review
• Push is to codify our procedures and processess and firm up those and transparency around them and communication.
• Create DSpace bylaws and operating manuals, and principles and code of conduct
• Clarify elections processes, timelines and transition periods (which have been challenging)
• Looking at reorganising the governance documents and making sure that there is no duplication and information is consistent
• The Task Force will submit a charge for Steering review. The work of the Task Force will have built-in feedback and input cycles for Steering and Leadership.

Q: increased transparency (e.g. sharing steering notes more promptly), is that working?

  - Positive feedback, people find those notes useful

  - Part of the governance work is to codify how we communicate

Governance

Elections for 2024-2025 governance year

Leadership Members

• Leadership is one year term (November 2024-October 2025)
• Vice-chair is one-year position (Nov 2024 - Oct 2025) Call for nominations will go out in the Fall after the new Leadership is seated. Be thinking about self-nominations.
• Three seats open for Steering after Leadership is constituted (3-year term from Nov 2024) Call for nominations will go out after the new Leadership is seated. Be thinking about self-nominations.

Staffing news

• Two positions doing searches for:
  • DSpace Coordinator (part time) position: interviews to take place end of February
  • Lyrasis Director of Operations for Community Supported Technologies (CST) position

Community 

DCAT update

• Building up the community and sustainability
• Improved attendance
• Primarily from US, Canada and UK, Australia and South America
• Working out how orientation about DCAT can be develop to help new members
• Enhancing/pro-active communications with national user groups; ensuring we capture the broad range of perspectives from our user groups
• Enhancing DCAT web presence
• Working on a DCAT convenors group
• Vice-chair appointed to gather topics for meetings, presentations, etc.
• Improving cascading information to Leadership/Steering. E.g. proposal for the UX Working group is a successful example of this.
• Moving forward with preps for the Testathon, and there is a working group working on it.
• UX Working group is getting stater, working on the UX testing schedule.
  • Some Institutions have UX teams at their institution that can help developing the UX test cases

Action: DCAT chair to gather from providers info regarding features to be tested.

Community 

IOI Catalog Update - "Infra Finder Tool"

• Tool that's designed to make it easier to determine what open tools, services and systems could meet an academic library or research institution's infrastructure needs.
• DSpace is listed in their catalog
• Launch of the tool is delayed to April 2024
• Challenges are to ask for comparable information given the differences in nature of the included programmes.

Community 

Events

DSpace and Open Repositories

• Great range of proposals accepted
• List presentation at https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/DSpace+at+OR2024

Annual DSpace German User Group Meeting (Praxistreffen) organized by The Library Code will take place in early April in Mainz (Germany)

• 2 day: talks and workshops; and second day focusing on workshops (DSpace 7 entities)

North American User Group meeting, Sept 23-25, 2024, in , hosted by the University of Minnesota.

• Have a meeting on years where OR is not the US
• Sept 23-25, 2024 - hosted by the University of Minnesota.
• Call for proposals coming up

Other meetings:

• DSpace Repositories Meeting took place in Switzerland in December with good attendance. Planning to meet again before the summer

Lyrasis   

Events

• Lyrasis Board Meeting: board is interested in listening and working more with a broader community outside of just North America. There's representatives from 9 countries in Latin America and 3 in Central America, and chair and vice-chair of Leaderships will be attending remotely.
• Lyrasis Member Summit: takes place annually and is virtual. Keynote around BRAVE leadership (Bold, Resilient, Adaptable, Vulnerable and Encouraging)

Leadership

Upcoming - future agenda topics

• Brainstorming future agenda topics, which could be also raised them via email

Decisions

Outcomes

Action Items

• Type your task here, using "@" to assign to a user and "//" to select a due date
•