DCAT Meeting July 2016

Date & Time

• July 12th 15:00 UTC/GMT - 11:00 ET

Dial-in

We will use the international conference call dial-in. Please follow directions below.

• U.S.A/Canada toll free: 866-740-1260, participant code: 2257295
• International toll free: http://www.readytalk.com/intl 
  
  • Use the above link and input 2257295 and the country you are calling from to get your country's toll-free dial in #
  • Once on the call, enter participant code 2257295

Agenda

Discussion topic: DCAT objectives and meeting topics for the second half of 2016.

Together we will discuss the feedback from the recent email thread on what DCAT should be discussing in the next months.

Overall, 3 main topics were suggested:

1. Contributing to the DSpace 7 user interface overhaul 
2. Deeper functional and architectural ambitions: (meta)data model, complexity vs simplicity, ...
3. Sharing best practices and challenges in the use of existing DSpace features

The feedback from the 6 respondents so far seem to indicate that:

• There's interest in all of these topics
• As a sub topic of #3, statistics look like the hottest topic so far.

Questions we could cover during the call to get a better view on how we can put agenda's together:

• Is the monthly DCAT call the right forum for a group that would work on DSpace 7 UX?
• Are you interested in being more involved in preparing/leading some of these meetings? Are there any interesting guest speakers we could invite?
• Should we focus more on the interactive parts of doing Q&A and open discussions, or should we gear these calls into a more presentation-heavy format, where a presenter prepares a substantial piece of content to convey to the attendees?

We are hoping to get more input on top of the feedback of the 6 people who already responded via email, before we decide where we are taking the DCAT calls in the next months.

Preparing for the call

Review the preferences of the respondents so far through this link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/dspacecommunityadvisoryteam/12WHoUHghYE 

Bring your questions/comments you would like to discuss to the call, or add them to the comments of this meeting page.

If you can join the call, or are willing to comment on the topics submitted via the meeting page, please add your name, institution, and repository URL to the Call Attendees section below.

Meeting notes

Contributing to the DSpace 7 user interface overhaul

Tim Donohue clarified that the DSpace community has decided on Angular 2 as the framework for the new UI technology. The most important goals for DSpace 7 are to upgrade/improve the DSpace rest API, and to build a single, new UI on top of this REST API in Angular 2.

The REST API improvement work will be the preliminary back end work to be carried out first, before the entire UI can be built.

The call participants agreed that a separate working group makes more sense than having these discussions in DCAT, which is essentially an interest group. However, the UI/UX group can take the opportunity to report back on their progress or hit the DCAT audience with particular questions as one item on the agenda of a monthly DCAT call.

Several people including the following have expressed interested in joining this UI/UX working group:

Felicity Dykas

Monika Mevenkamp

Susan Borda

Tiago Guimarães

Pauline Ward

(*ED: please add your name or edit this list if I got this wrong)

Timeline for this group: Oktober-November to produce a first analysis and/or mockups for the new UI.

It is advised to leverage the work already done in the Use Case space, however, some of the use cases in there describe functionality that is not yet offered by DSpace. The first goal would be to cover UI/UX work that doesn't require more fundamental changes to the application and/or data model.

Several call participants recommended that this UI/UX group should look at what other repositories and systems are doing:

Bepress, Hydra in a Box, Dataverse, CKAN.

Some areas, like UX changes for dealing with workflow or submissions, may lie in a grey zone where it is not super clear from a repository manager point of view, which kind of suggestions may have a bigger underlying impact.

Deeper functional and architectural ambitions: (meta)data model, complexity vs simplicity, ...

Complex and deep changes to DSpace will be easier to implement once the community has convened on a single UI. This is the key reason why bigger, complex changes to the application or the data model will be lower in priority for DSpace 7 than the UI/UX and REST API work. However, DCAT can still have those deeper discussions where we can identify in which direction the community and the platform should go eventually.

Mariya Maistrovskaya indicated that her institution is interested to see how some of the DSpace-CRIS features might be brought into the mainline DSpace code. Participants from the University of Minho, working on "PTCRIS" also share this interest to exchange information and approaches there.

Community Forum calls: Sharing best practices and challenges in the use of existing DSpace features

There is an interest to share best practices and questions about following functional areas of DSpace, that leads to immediate benefit for the call attendees:

• DSpace statistics
  • interpreting statistics
  • improving robot filtering & assessing robot traffic
  • exchanging which types of reports are being used for which purposes
• Bulk metadata editing & uploading content
  • Building simple archive format structures/folders
  • Working with the spreadsheet bulk editing tool
  • Command line imports
• Authentication & Authorization
  • The policy wildcard tool: what can it be used for and what to watch out for
  • How authorization policies are enforced on the different dspace interfaces (xmlui, jspui, oai-pmh, rest, rss, ...)
  • Request a copy
  • Configuring embargos
  • Implications of changing settings
  • What are bundle permissions used for?
• Crosswalks
  • For which purposes are people using the crosswalks bundled with DSpace today
• Submissions & Workflow
• Search, Discovery and Browse
  • Applying SOLR configuration
  • Changing facets, metadata fields, indexes
  • Explaining "relevance" ranking of search results, detecting problems with this sorting
  • Explaining "more like this" listing of items
• Authority control
  • Success stories for using ORCID
  • Confidence values: how are they used, why are they relevant?

The most frequently discussed topics on stackoverflow or the dspace tech mailing list can also be a good source to identify some of these topics.

DCAT might have an image/branding issue when the goal is to involve new people or beginning repository managers here. As a solution, this "type" of DCAT call can be communicated/marketed as "Community Forum" calls. Could still be mentioned as "DCAT" presents, but it should be clear that you shouldn't consider yourself an "advisor" in order to attend/benefit from this..

Tim Donohue suggested that this group could create a collection of brief videos on topics of interest.  These videos could be used as training materials and to spark discussion among community members.

Post-Call Suggestions for the next months ahead

August: Community Forum Call: DSpace statistics

September: DCAT discussion: DSpace standard Data model and DSpace-CRIS: exploring convergence

October: Community Forum Call: Importing and Bulk metadata editing

November: DCAT discussion: Update on DSpace UI/UX working group - findings, next steps

December: Community Forum Call: DSpace authentication and authorization demystified

Call Attendees

• Maureen Walsh - The Ohio State University
• Bram Luyten (Atmire)
• Tim Donohue
• Benedikt Kroll - Bavarian State Library
• Mariya Maistrovskaya - University of Toronto, TSpace
• Valerie Collins - University of Minnesota, UDC
• Terrence W Brady, Georgetown University
• Monika Mevenkamp, Princeton University
• Susan Borda - Montana State University
• Pauline Ward , University of Edinburgh
• Tiago Guimarães - University of Minho, Portugal
• Filipe Furtado - University of Minho, Portugal