Release Notes

Welcome to Release 1.8.0. The developers have volunteered many hours to fix, re-write and contribute new software code for this release. Documentation has also been updated.

The following is a list of the new features included for release 1.8.0 (not an exhaustive list):

• Improvements to the upgrade and configuration process (sections of dspace.cfg have been split into separate configuration files).
• More Curation Tools/Plugins.
• Configurable Workflow.
• SWORD Client.
• SWORDv2 Server Module.
• RSS feeds now support richer features, such as iTunes podcast and publishing to iTunesU (see new "webui.feed.podcast.*" settings).
• Enhancements to Discovery.
• Rewrite of Creative Commons licensing for the XMLUI.
• Reordering of bitstreams.
• Enable virus checking during submission.
• Ability to Withdraw/Reinstate/Delete Items in Bulk, via Batch Metadata Editing.

A full list of all changes / bug fixes in 1.8.0 is available in the History section.

The following people have contributed directly to this release of DSpace: Alex Lemann, Álvaro López, Andrea Schweer, Ben Bosman, Bill Hays, Bram De Schouwer, Bram Luyten, Brian Freels-Stendel, Claudia Jürgen, David Chandek-Stark, Denys Slipetskyy, Fabio Bolognesi, Gareth Waller, Hardik Mishra, Hardy Pottinger, Ivan Masár, James Russell, Janne Pietarila, Jason Stirnaman, Joonas Kesäniemi, Jordan Piščanc, Jose Blanco, Juan García, Kevin Van de Velde, Kim Shepherd, Konstantinos V. Paraskevopoulos 1, Lighton Phiri, Mark Diggory, Mark H. Wood, Nicholas Riley, Onivaldo Rosa Junior, Peter Dietz, Richard Rodgers, Robin Taylor, Ronee Francis, Samuel Ottenhoff, Scott Phillips, Stuart Lewis, Stuart Yeates, Terry Burton, Tim Donohue, Timo Aalto, Vladislav Zhivkov, Wendy Bossons. Many of them could not do this work without the support (release time and financial) of their associated institutions. We offer thanks to those institutions for supporting their staff to take time to contribute to the DSpace project.

A big thank you also goes out to the DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT), who helped the developers to prioritize and plan out several of the new features that made it into this release. The current DCAT members include: Amy Lana, Augustine Gitonga, Bram Luyten, Ciarán Walsh, Claire Bundy, Dibyendra Hyoju, Elena Feinstein, Elin Stangeland, Imma Subirats, Iryna Kuchma, Jennifer Laherty, Jim Ottaviani, Leonie Hayes, Maureen Walsh, Michael Guthrie, Sarah Shreeves, Sue Kunda, and Valorie Hollister.

We apologize to any contributor accidentally left off this list. DSpace has such a large, active development community that we sometimes lose track of all our contributors. Our ongoing list of all known people/institutions that have contributed to DSpace software can be found on our DSpace Contributors page. Acknowledgements to those left off will be made in future releases.

Want to see your name appear in our list of contributors? All you have to do is report an issue, fix a bug, improve our documentation or help us determine the necessary requirements for a new feature! Visit our Issue Tracker to report a bug, or join dspace-devel mailing list to take part in development work. If you'd like to help improve our current documentation, please get in touch with one of our Committers with your ideas. You don't even need to be a developer! Repository managers can also get involved by volunteering to join the DSpace Community Advisory Team and helping our developers to plan new features.

The Documentation Gardener for this release was Jeffrey Trimble with input from everyone.  All typos are his fault.

Robin Taylor was the Release Coordinator of this release with immeasurable help from the DSpace Technical Lead Tim Donohue.

Additional thanks to Tim Donohue from DuraSpace for keeping all of us focused on the work at hand, and calming us when we got excited and for the general support for the DSpace project.