The represents who will be taking notes for a given meeting. It rotates after each meeting to the next person in the attendee list.
*Members of DSpace Steering Group
**Community At Large Representative
***Ex-officio member nominated by the Leadership Group as representative of the community at large. Ex-officio members do not have voting rights
Agenda
Time
Item
Information
Who
1
5 min
Welcome
Welcome
Thank you to note-taker
Maureen
2
10 min
Financial Report
End of FY22-23 Financial Report
Overall, we are slightly ahead of revenue expectations and below expected expenses.
Fiscal Year Summary
The fiscal year is July 1- June 30. This report reflects the end of the fiscal year.
Variances include:
In DSpace’s favor: membership dues (includes onetime donations), fundraising, SCOSS payments, contract labor, travel, IDC
Negative to DSpace: service provider fees (pilot year of revised program) and consultants (in part due to shifting SCOSS expenses to this line)
SCOSS – 3 Year Pledge Campaign
Approximately $ 209,000 US pledged so far over 3 years
SCOSS funds can only be used to support SCOSS staffing goals (Program Coordinator). That revenue isn’t available for other program activities. Thus, the pledges make it appear we have more funds available for all activities than we do.
SCOSS assets
Funds received $ 156,739 US so far minus expenses $ 60,029 US: $ 96,709.75 US
Assets
Overall Net Assets: Retained & current net assets (including SCOSS): $ 163,555 US
SCOSS assets (Funds received so far minus expenses): $ 96,709.75 US
Available Assets: $ 66,845.00 US
Laurie
3
5-10 min
Membership and Governance
Membership Renewals
Governance nominations and elections
Michele
4
10 min
Registered Service Providers
Registered Service Providers Pilot Year Report
Michele
5
5 min
Grants
DSpace Grant Work
Michele
6
15 min
Staffing
Program Coordinator Role Next Steps
Explore in kind from institution, e.g., visiting program officer
Maureen
7
30 min
Development
Development Update
DSpace 7.6.1
DSpace 8.0
Tentative release date April 2024
Scaled down feature set and focus on community/operations/roadmapping
Include features that missed DSpace 7.6 if possible
Agreed this is impressive, and an opportunity to consider whether to increase reserve funds for future
We were in the red for DSpace 7.5, and several organizations stepped up to fund the development and get DSpace out of the red for DSpace 7.6
Membership and Governance
Renewals and Memberships
Over $300,000 in memberships committed
We can go forward with nominations process
12 SCOSS contributions - $75,000
Another $35,000 in contributions for DSpace Development Fund
Only four institutions did not renew yet
Two new members will be joining January 2024
This does not include Service Provider Program
Registered Service Providers (RSP) Pilot
Pilot year
Goals:
Get RSPs more engaged
Increase transparency
Have RSPs more involved in technical development of DSpace
Assessment is all goals have been achieved
Last year – 21 RSPs
Pilot – 10 RSPs
Previously, 21 RSPs provided $50,000 to DSpace
In the pilot, the 10 RSPs provided 60,000 to DSpace
The pilot increased the fee and created 3 tiers, including adding an in-kind contribution that would be tied to reducing financial contribution at the end of the year. Over 4,000 hours of in-kind contributions, which translates to $240,000 of equivalent financial contribution. Combined with the $60,000 in financial contribution, this equals $300,000 in value of total contributions
RSP pilot members can highlight their values of commitment to DSpace as an open source
This pilot also motivated some RSPs who were inactive previously to be more active
Publishing activity on the wiki also allows the community to check and validate what the RSPs are contributing and spent time assessing and evaluating this process for accuracy and consistency
Steering Group will be reviewing recommendations for formalizing Program to continue
Questions / Comments:
None
DSpace Grant Work
Letter submitted to Mellon Foundation and awaiting response
Letter describes general summary of intention
If accepted, a full proposal is next stage.
Program Coordinator Role and Next Steps
Natalie has vacated position
SCOSS funds this position
Goal was to grow this into full time position, but SCOSS funding was less than goal (FT coordinator and junior developer)
$96,000 in SCOSS funding
Options:
Part time role is difficult
We may have funds to hire FTE for full year but no funding beyond that
Could we hire a term position? Retention is difficult
Consulting option, though there is value for coordinator to already be embedded in the DSpace community
Could a member institution have a staff member serve in this role as an in person contribution? What level would this need to be? Could we build this as a professional development opportunity? Such as a Visiting Program Officer role?
Questions/Comments:
Given that we do not have enough money for a Community Manager for a full year, perhaps it is better to hire a freelance junior developer looking for part time development work? Appreciate the role of the community manager, but based on the financial situation, perhaps the development priority is more actionable.
Also consider ways to better support Tim Donohue.
Laurie acknowledges that SCOSS Funding may not allow contract work.
Laurie shares that if a member wants to contribute in-kind, SCOSS funding to complement.
If a member institution is interested in exploring, reach out to Maureen or Laurie
Concern about members who are not in this call – if this is a plan to move forward, so should this be a call to the community to include members who do not get to participate in Steering or Leaders. Do we start with this group? If no one responds from this group, does that make this less feasible? Or should we start with a call to the community?
The notes of Leaders are public, and the more people who can read and know about these needs and opportunities, the better.
A lot of in-kind contributions in the past year are not technical: Communication, Marketing, Webinars, user groups organization, etc.
Development Update
7.6 was released and is feature complete. It will move into maintenance mode as 7.6.x for maintenance releases only. No date set for 7.6.1 release, but bug fixes are currently being approved, but will be released in fall.
8.0
Tentative release date April 2024 (April will be planned for major release every year in future)
Scaled down feature set and focus on community/operations/roadmapping
What is the overall goal for this POC proposal? It is to make it more interoperable with preservation systems or accomplish preservation itself or something else?
This is a goal from the new Lyrasis CEO to be interoperable with preservation systems and be able accomplish basic preservation tasks on its own.
Including block storage capability so that the content could be visible without needing to use DSpace in the future to preserve the objects rather than having to preserve DSpace in its entirety.
Members are welcome to add comments to the Google Doc linked above. This is still at the brainstorm level.
Steering has discussed evaluating functionality that is only in DSpace 6 to carry into DSpace 8 with the caveat that would require volunteer hours - Community and collection level searching, as an example
Were unintentionally left off the list above.
Anything overlooked that was not brought from 6 to 7 can be added if someone volunteers or commits funding explicitly for the work.
Multi-lingual user interface, specifically more fluent support has been discussed before and is a struggle to members.
It would be good to capture any problems in tickets, as there was nothing specifically mentioned to focus on.
Managing Collection names in several languages, is an example
This can be revisited in next Steering meeting
Community Events updates
Africa ArXiv – they run a comparative analysis of vendor and open repositories in conjunction with UbuntuNet to plan for a possible continental repository as a central repository. They are not seeking any contributions from DSpace, but coordination and potential contributions to DSpace, as there are four developers assigned for this project.
Questions were more oriented with specific issues after the upgrade or during upgrade planning. More help oriented rather than information gathering, as in previous Q&A’s. Demonstrates momentum towards active migrations to 7.6
New DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) Chair
Kimberly Chapman, University of Arizona
Ex officio, not voting member of Leaders
Update:
Seeking to fill role of vice chair
Focus theme for year:
Defined annual by DCAT and Steering
Last year was Year of DSpace 7. Next year will likely be Year of DSpace 8. But this year could likely be focused on Community Engagement
Also need to think about when to stop with DSpace 7 documentation and move to DSpace 8
DSpace 8 Test-a-thon time frame
UX testing, different from bug reporting – is it feasible to include with test-a-thon?
Is accessibility scanning automated or is part of testing?
Not automated beyond scanning tools, which is not perfect and doesn’t run on every single page
No funding for accessibility expertise
Treated as bugs presently, and fixed as quickly as possible
TDL and Lyrasis did fund hiring an accessibility consulting review
An accessibility issue Cornell’s accessibility lead saw in our dspace 7.6 instance was some accessibility issues with keyboard nav and drop-downs (main nav seems fine - more in-page issue)
From the Community
World Bank
Possibility of resuming North American DSpace user group conferences
Univ of Minnesota hosted in 2019 and would support reviving of NA user group
DSpace7, Angular 2 and across the board decline in repository usage statistics
One issue was a bug that was discovered and should be fixed in 7.6.1
Second issue is Angular UI is tougher on bot activity getting through defenses – this is a good thing, but raises questions about consistency of usage statistics
Another issue is Google indexing with Google Scholar
Tim D is in touch with Google Scholar team
Constant URLs for bitstreams – should they make a comeback?
Old bitstreams links will work, but new links starting in 7.0 forward will not work. Versioning does not help with this.
This could be something to seek volunteer to develop to bring from v6 to v8.
