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.
This page details features that are frequently asked for out of DSpace, but are not yet implemented (at least in a stable, out-of-the-box fashion). Anyone should feel free to to add features requests, content or references to this page. Developers should feel free to tackle any of these features and link to other pages to describe your plans/work in more detail.
In no particular order, some frequently requested features:
Contents
Statistics
The DSpace JSPUI has some very basic statistics available out-of-the-box. However, they are lacking in many ways, and do not have any means of filtering out web-spiders, etc.
There are various statistics "plugins" or "addons" that you can install in DSpace, but nothing that has been truly accepted at this time. The following Wiki pages describe ongoing Statistics work:
- StatisticsAddOn - Developed by Universidade of Minho, and seems to be one of best available
- Google+Summer+of+Code+2007+Statistics - Work by Federico Paparoni out of Google+Summer+of+Code '07
- DspaceStatistics - Out of date proposals for various statistical packages
- Modular+Usage+Statistics - Proposal for a general view event "tap" usable for gathering statistics
- Statistical+Improvements+for+v1.6 - Ideas for short-term improvement.
Versioning
DSpace currently does not support versioning of items. However, there are some general plans in place to hopefully implement this feature for a 2.0 release, based on the work that came out of Google+Summer+of+Code+2007_Versioning
Distributed Community / Collection Management
DSpace currently only supports minimal distributed management at a Collection level, in the form of Collection Administrators. However, at this point in time, there is no such thing as a Community Administrator to allow for distributed management of individual Communities.
The closest anyone has gotten to implement this feature is in the now out-of-date patch:
Authorization System: Delegate Admins (SF#13736513) by Andrea Bollini
Embargo
There have been numerous attempts at implementing simple embargo functionality into the DSpace Submission process. Among them, including:
However, perhaps the most substantial embargo work has come from Elliot Metsger (JHU), who is working on an Embargo module for DSpace 1.5+:
Streaming Media
There have been many requests for hints/tips on integrating streaming audio/video into DSpace (on listservs). But, as of yet, there have been no references written up.
- The+Challenge+of+Audio+and+Video - Collection point for thoughts on approaching the problem.
- http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2009/05/27/easy-pseudo-video-streaming-for-dspace-repositories
Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETDs)
There are a few projects which have attempted (or are attempting) a theses & dissertation workflow within DSpace:
- TapirAddOn - JSP-based E-Theses addon for DSpace built by Richard Jones. Seems to now be out-of-date, since it hasn't been updated since 2005.
- Vireo - Although in its infancy, Texas Digital Library received an IMLS grant to build Vireo, a Common Submission System for ETDs which is based off of the Manakin XMLUI.
Support for hierarchical LDAP servers - FIXED IN 1.5.2
The LDAP support currently in DSpace only supports a flat authentication structure. Many institutions use a hierarchical strcture which is slightly more complex.
- There is a patch on the queue that addresses this, but also tries to do a few other things so this needs teasing out
- Robin from Edinburgh has also written a patch for this.
- Stuart Lewis will volunteer to look into this.
Some LDAP-enabled applications also allow the setting of multiple LDAP servers with different settings. Is this a requirement for DSpace?
Better Windows O/S support
DSpace runs fine on Windows, but is still a little bit Unix oriented. Most of the scripts that come bundled are unix shell scripts.
- Could this be addressed by creating a DSpace command shell? An xml file can be used to define commands and which Java classes they call (and what arguments are required) and then we just need two scripts - dspace.bat and dspace.sh. Commands could then be in the form of "dspace.sh filter-media" or "dspace.bat import args"?
Branding (name of service)
Most installations of DSpace brand their service, so 'MyDSpace' becomes 'MyXYZ'. At present to do this you have to do a lot of search and replacing in messages.properties. It would be good if a service name could be set in dspace.cfg.
One approach introduces parameter substitution into message texts from dspace.cfg.
Hit highlighting in search results
Highlight hits of searched-for words in search results. I think Lucene has a package for this and there is a patch of the queue that uses that.
OAI
The DSpace OAI offers only very basic sets out-of-the-box. Sets are always directly linked to DSpace collections. If customized sets are required, these can only be offered through collection mapping or (core) code changes. This requirement is essential for the DRIVER OAI harvester and some other OAI harvesters
The following Wiki page describes potential solutions for making OAI sets more customizable:
- DSpaceOAISets - Proposal of solutions for making sets more configurable