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DSpace is a turn-key web application for maintaining, disseminating and promoting the digital resources or digital output of an organization and its members.

Community /

Assumptions

  • We do NOT plan to rewrite DSpace from scratch, for the following reasons:
    • We have a highly active (and global) development community on the existing platform. We are averaging 50+ contributors in recent major releases. We also have a very active and healthy set of service providers.
    • A complete rewrite would require significant funding / centralized resources, neither of which are currently available. There also seem to be few (if any) grant opportunities to rebuild existing, established platforms.
    • A complete rewrite is very risky in the open source world. While in some cases it can succeed, it also can run the risk of fragmenting or fracturing a user community or developer community.
  • We ARE aiming for a potentially substantial leap forward in user experience / web user interface.
    • We've heard the feedback that neither of the two UIs (JSPUI or XMLUI) provides an optimal user or administrative experience. So, a UI rewrite or major refactoring would be "on the table".

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  • Action 1A: Verify and validate the needs of a "modern institutional repository". This is instrumental in formalizing the value proposition of DSpace.
  • Action 1B: Survey the community on gathered use cases
    • (Do we want another, post OR15 survey of the community based on Strategic Plan, Tech Roadmap & Use Case gathering?)
  • Action 1C: Clarify and improve the DSpace value proposition. Enhance our message and goals of the project going forward.  The DSpace Steering Group is working towards establishment of a new "DSpace Marketing Working Group" to help with this effort
    NOTE: This is not really a "Technology" activity, but more of a "Sustainability" activity.Action 1D: Identify minimum set of functionality/features for 'IR-core' and refactor codebase to provide this. This core may not be functional as-is, since it may require plugins that aren't extensions (e.g. authN)

Related Sustainability Action (This needs to be eventually moved to a  "Strategic Plan - Sustainability", to be created)

  • Action: Clarify and improve the DSpace value proposition. Enhance our message and goals of the project going forward.  The DSpace Steering Group is working towards establishment of a new "DSpace Marketing Working Group" to help with this effort

Goal 2: DSpace will be "lean", with agility and flexibility as primary goals

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  • Action 2A: Converge on a single, out-of-the-box user interface (UI). DSpace will no longer be released with multiple User Interfaces (JSPUI vs XMLUI).  A single user interface should be developed as DSpace's out-of-the-box UI. Early discussions on the requirements of this single UI (and some brainstormed candidates) are at Brainstorms on a Future UI.
  • Action 2B: Converge on a single, out-of-the-box search/browse system.  DSpace will only support Apache Solr for search/browse, and the older, deprecated Lucene and DB search/browse system should be removed.
  • Action 2C: Converge on a single, built-in statistical engine. DSpace will only support a single, built-in statistical engine (based on Apache Solr), and support for Elastic Search statistics should removed or migrated to an optional module. Support for Google Analytics will be retained, as it's an optional integration with an external statistics engine.
  • Action 2D: Develop a basic User Interface "style / layout guide". In order to ensure a consistent user experience across all pages/features within the User Interface, we should provide basic guidelines for layout and styling of common page elements, etc. Examples may include basic guidelines for how errors/warnings/notices should be displayed, what class(es) to use for types of buttons, etc.

Related Community Action (This needs to be eventually moved to a  "Strategic Plan - Community", to be created)

  • Action: Enhance communication and collaboration. In order to avoid duplicative effort / projects in the future, we need to enhance communication and collaboration between various developers, institutions and service providers, and communicate a common vision / roadmap for the platform.
    • As a part of this action, we will be developing and maintaining a Technical Roadmap for the DSpace software platform, detailing high priority development projects which can be "claimed" or shared by groups of developers, institutions or service providers
    • At the same time, we should recognize that ad-hoc or competitive work can also be beneficial. We should continue to encourage ad-hoc contributions, and even competitive contributions, but make it clear that we will actively discourage further unnecessary duplicative functionality to be added to the platform.

Goal 3: DSpace can be "extended" (think plugins) or have "hooks" (integration points) to complimentary services/tools

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