DCAT Meeting December 2014

Community, Collection, Container

What is the use of a Collection vs Community? Is this a real term that can distinguish people on your campus? Collection and Community in DSpace have many overlapping features, that I'm wondering about merging them into the same thing, and calling it container. Container is like Community, in that it can have sub-Containers, and Container would be like Collection, in that you can submit Items to it.

Reorganizing Hierarchy

I would also be interested in seeing "Drag and Drop" rearranging of Community/Collection/Container hierarchy. This is something that happens from time to time, and rather than having to have your technical administrator manually craft some SQL to accomplish this, to instead allow DSpace to have a proper method of accomplishing this.

Bitstream Relationships

I don't like the BUNDLE object, I'd rather that just be some sort of metadata about Bitstreams. I would like to see relationships between bitstreams though. And a clearer process to store a master version of an object (TIFF), and then have a route for DSpace to either generate derivatives/renditions on-the-fly, or a background process to create renditions. Then you could have policy rules / preset templates that say that for image-type master's you'll want XL png, L png, M png, S png, thumbnail png to be generated, which a UI can use depending on context. There could be similar presets for document type content, where some bitstream structure (plus other DSpace components) allows you to map between master and various derivatives (PDF, ODF, RDF, txt, png slides).

Dynamic Collections / Facet browsing

I like Terry's idea of "Dynamic Collections". We have a site that maps imported items into say 5+ owning collections at once (I've modified SAFBuilder and Longsight's ItemImport to handle this), when really I think some of this could be metadata that dynamic views (Discovery facets?) would be another way of accomplishing this. Instead of this Item has owning collections for example of: 1820's Photographs, East London, Photographs of People, James Family, Black and White Photographs, to instead just have a way to use that as metadata, and browse results for groups of facets.

I'm interested in discussing the use case that was already added by Mark Diggory:

 Structure - Describe Individual Bitstream within an Item

• richer metadata on the bitstream level, for example:
  • preservation metadata
  • version descriptor (preprint, postprint, ...) in the case of a typic academic IR.

I must say as a fairly new user of DSpace, that I've found it takes a long time to get to grips with the structure, and I find myself repeatedly having to explain it very carefully to submitters. It's good to have flexibility in the structure. I wish there was a bit more transparency in the structure i.e. for it to be much clearer to the administrator or the submitter (and also to the casual browsing user) what the structure is. For example - in our database we usually set permissions on a Collection such that the initial depositor will be the only user with permission to submit further datasets to the Collection. This is rather counterintuitive though, because the Collection sits within a Community. There may or may not be other researchers who are admins of the Community, but they would usually not have any permissions to edit datasets sitting in the Collections belonging to that Community. So I think it would be helpful if that was more obvious e.g. at the stage of creating the Collection, and at the stage of submitting an Item. 

Not sure where is the best place to post / send this, sorry, but I would like to suggest for the 2015 programme that coping with very large files should be a focus. In particular, how to protect the database from risk of overload due to multiple users downloading very large files. Based on our experience here at Edinburgh I'm talking about deposits containing files ranging in size from 3Gb to 300Gb (because we can handle files of 2Gb or smaller easily, and because we've not yet had any depositor ask to deposit anything larger than 300Gb). Please let me know if I should re-post/send this in a different place, thanks v much.