Contribute to the DSpace Development Fund

The newly established DSpace Development Fund supports the development of new features prioritized by DSpace Governance. For a list of planned features see the fund wiki page.

The diversity of statistical patches to DSpace suggests that we should take a modular approach. For one thing, in this way many ideas can be snapped into sites and tried out. For another, the substantial amount of work to be done can be decoupled from ongoing DSpace development as much as possible, to relieve the add-on developer of much of the burden of tracking changes to the base code.

I envision three layers:

  1. detecting events such as community and collection views and bitstream downloads;
  2. persisting relevant information about such events;
  3. presenting abstracts of the event data.

The interface between detection and persistence should be through a plugin loaded via the PluginManager. Interfacing persistence with presentation will depend on the nature of the particular persistence mechanism and the needs of the particular presentation layer.

As a proof-of-concept and jumping-off point for discussion, I've built a patch Usage-Event-Instrumentation_patch.mht  against DSpace 1.4.2 release. It also includes a test implementation of the persistence layer which merely writes event records to a log file.

[time passes]

There is now a patch 2025998 in the queue against DSpace 1_5_x which incorporates feedback received on the earlier patches.

[more time passes]

A further development of the detection plugin interface was included in DSpace 1.5.2.

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