Community communication forthcoming outlining the accessibility funding status, spending strategy, special funding call deadline, submitting tickets, audit requests
Kristi
3
10 min
Financials
Quarterly Financial Report: Oct 1, 2023-Dec 31, 2023
Overall, it is positive to FY23-23 budget (financial plan) at half way point of fiscal year.
Variances include:
Positive for DSpace: service provider fees, membership dues, travel, SCOSS expenses (due to position vacancy), and IDC
Creation of more automated accessibility scanning/tests (similar to this PR from Tim: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/2711). The goal is to have this scanning performed for all pages in DSpace, but it must be added page by page.
As these tests are added, remediation may be required on pages which do not pass the automated tests.
Finally, if funding remains or additional funding is contributed, Steering will use those to hire Deque (or a similar accessibility assessment firm) to perform a new, formal accessibility assessment of DSpace.
Accessibility issues can be reported as tickets to be addressed in future releases. If institutions perform accessibility scans, they are welcome to share those results with Tim. But, to ensure issues are resolved more rapidly, we recommend creating tickets.
1) Theme: Community Engagement Attendance at monthly meetings: 15-20 people since September, 27 at February meeting
- provide more opportunities for community engagement via DCAT meetings - orientation to DCAT and community participation - how to get involved - how to report issues - proactive communication with national user groups - communication gap - planning and documentation - meeting planning, DCAT Vice Chair Paige Morgan (University of Delaware), build sustainability and continuity - document processes/procedures for DCAT - highlight wiki content of interest to repository managers - project charge - steps for feedback and approval
2) DCAT Testathon Preparation Group (Iryna Kuchma EIFL and Priscilla Carmini University of Waterloo) - offer collaborative testing sessions
3) DSpace UX Testing led by Erica Johns
* o Spring 2024 = time to develop tests * o Fall 2024 = time to distribute tests to institutions/orgs * o Winter/spring 2025 = synthesize feedback/findings and make recommendations to DSpace dev/leadership
Targeted funding accessibility ask with the Development Fund
Update on financial activities DDF:
Launched mini campaign in the fall focused on accessibility compliance for D7 - fund paid development to improve it
Prioritised by governance
Focus on DSpace 7 but available in DSpace 8 and beyond
To date raised 20,000$ via the listed organisations
Discussions at Steering taking place re how to best utilise those funds
Developing guidance to help institutions contributing to this
Special campaign for accessibility contributions ends June 1
Q: How does membership allocation to dedicated/specific work?
A: For new members this is allowed in cases where it helps getting approval at their institutions. Other alternative is for existing members to increase their membership on a one-time basis with the overage earmarked to the development fund.
Financials
Quarterly Financial Report: Oct 1, 2023-Dec 31, 2023
Notes:
Overall, it is positive to FY23-23 budget (financial plan) at half way point of fiscal year
Fund raising on track for the year
SCOSS currently under due to their billing requirements - build up as it has not been used so far (planned to be spent on hiring the community manager)
Close to what was estimated for the year; end of the year is where we really get a sense of where we are
Q: Timings on budgeting for next year?
A: Hoping to have a draft for Steering to look at in March
Development
DSpace 7
Accessibility priorities
DSpace Development Fund accessibility campaign funding prioritization approved by Steering:
Accessibility priorities: re-prioritisation has taken place (full re-analysis originally planned will be replaced with other activities - development work on fixes and enhancing automated testing in the DSpace app). Unused funding can go to partial/full re-analysis work
Plea for institutions conducting internal accessibility audits to share their results, preferably as issue tickets
Updated accessibility statement for DSpace will be available soon - revamping it and enhancing documentation (e.g. how to report accessibility issues)
Thanks to contributors for their donated fixes that DSpace 8.0 development has received (ported to DSpace 7.x)
DSpace 8.0
Work on prioritised main features is going as planned
More details available in 8.0 Status page and 8.0 Project board
Shift in release schedule to mid-May 2024 due to critical work on major dependency updates for both backend and frontend (Java and angular)
Testathon shifted to April 1-12
Importance of emphasising that a lot of (hidden) work in this release has gone into maintenance. Lots of bug fixes also included in this release
Ongoing work on testathon documentation is taking place
Breakouts
State of Repositories
Topics suggested by Leadership members:
Cyber security
Compliance - federal/funder mandates (e.g. open access)
Impact tracking - Reporting on repositories
Discoverability of repositories
Catch up with developments in the Scholarly ecosystem - diamond OA, COAR notify
Increased harvesting/indexing/bots affecting performance and statistics
Large Language Models (LLMs) training for AI purposes
Big performance issues at the infrastructure end. It is not a DSpace software issue
Good bots changing behaviours in terms crawl rates
Impact of AI Bots
Concerns around bots / harvesters not respecting content licensing, CORE was mentioned
Expanded uses of repositories, beyond traditional uses such as collection management
Increased costs of supporting the repository infrastructure
Equity of access
Taking advantage of AI technologies
AI and accessibility: improving our content in terms of accessibility
AI tools: automated metadata translation
Enhancing DSpace support for handling large content. Many DSpace repositories are increasingly taking research datasets.
Governance
Steering Updates
Steering Governance Task Force
First action: Draft a charge for Steering review
Push is to codify our procedures and processess and firm up those and transparency around them and communication.
Create DSpace bylaws and operating manuals, and principles and code of conduct
Clarify elections processes, timelines and transition periods (which have been challenging)
Looking at reorganising the governance documents and making sure that there is no duplication and information is consistent
The Task Force will submit a charge for Steering review. The work of the Task Force will have built-in feedback and input cycles for Steering and Leadership.
Q: increased transparency (e.g. sharing steering notes more promptly), is that working?
- Positive feedback, people find those notes useful
- Part of the governance work is to codify how we communicate
Governance
Elections for 2024-2025 governance year
Leadership Members
Leadership is one year term (November 2024-October 2025)
Vice-chair is one-year position (Nov 2024 - Oct 2025) Call for nominations will go out in the Fall after the new Leadership is seated. Be thinking about self-nominations.
Three seats open for Steering after Leadership is constituted (3-year term from Nov 2024) Call for nominations will go out after the new Leadership is seated. Be thinking about self-nominations.
Staffing news
Two positions doing searches for:
DSpace Coordinator (part time) position: interviews to take place end of February
Lyrasis Director of Operations for Community Supported Technologies (CST) position
Community
DCAT update
Building up the community and sustainability
Improved attendance
Primarily from US, Canada and UK, Australia and South America
Working out how orientation about DCAT can be develop to help new members
Enhancing/pro-active communications with national user groups; ensuring we capture the broad range of perspectives from our user groups
Enhancing DCAT web presence
Working on a DCAT convenors group
Vice-chair appointed to gather topics for meetings, presentations, etc.
Improving cascading information to Leadership/Steering. E.g. proposal for the UX Working group is a successful example of this.
Moving forward with preps for the Testathon, and there is a working group working on it.
UX Working group is getting stater, working on the UX testing schedule.
Some Institutions have UX teams at their institution that can help developing the UX test cases
Action: DCAT chair to gather from providers info regarding features to be tested.
Community
IOI Catalog Update - "Infra Finder Tool"
Tool that's designed to make it easier to determine what open tools, services and systems could meet an academic library or research institution's infrastructure needs.
DSpace is listed in their catalog
Launch of the tool is delayed to April 2024
Challenges are to ask for comparable information given the differences in nature of the included programmes.
Annual DSpace German User Group Meeting (Praxistreffen) organized by The Library Code will take place in early April in Mainz (Germany)
2 day: talks and workshops; and second day focusing on workshops (DSpace 7 entities)
North American User Group meeting, Sept 23-25, 2024, in , hosted by the University of Minnesota.
Have a meeting on years where OR is not the US
Sept 23-25, 2024 - hosted by the University of Minnesota.
Call for proposals coming up
Other meetings:
DSpace Repositories Meeting took place in Switzerland in December with good attendance. Planning to meet again before the summer
Lyrasis
Events
Lyrasis Board Meeting: board is interested in listening and working more with a broader community outside of just North America. There's representatives from 9 countries in Latin America and 3 in Central America, and chair and vice-chair of Leaderships will be attending remotely.
Lyrasis Member Summit: takes place annually and is virtual. Keynote around BRAVE leadership (Bold, Resilient, Adaptable, Vulnerable and Encouraging)
Leadership
Upcoming - future agenda topics
Brainstorming future agenda topics, which could be also raised them via email
Decisions
Outcomes
Action Items
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