Beginning in the late fall of 2012, the DuraSpace facilitated calls to explore if there were some common projects of interest to the DSpace community that might spark a community-driven, collaborative effort. The most common 3 themes are being explored further. Notes and materials from these potential projects are below. For more information visit http://www.duraspace.org/dspace-futures.

Initiatives

REST API / Repository Abstraction Layer

Discussions exploring the creation of a DSpace full-featured REST API that would permit more flexible and agile UI development and would ease integration with third-party tools and applications.

• Project Page (still rough, but a team is beginning work): DSpace Futures - REST API
• Meeting Notes
• Use Cases
• Interested Participants:
  
  • Anja Le Blanc, University of Manchester
  • Reinhard Engels, Harvard University
  • Hardy Pottinger, University of Missouri Library Systems

DSpace and Hydra

Discussions exploring either a DSpace Hydra head that would duplicate DSpace functionality using the Hydra framework (Ruby on Rails, Solr, Blacklight, Fedora) or other variations such as Hydra front-end development on top of the DSpace back-end.

• Meeting Notes
• Interested Participants: 
  
  • Reinhard Engels, Harvard University
    
    

Metadata Improvements

Discussions on metadata enhancement will be held on Wednesday, March 20 at 4:00pm EDT (20:00 UTC). To join this call, dial +1 209.647.1600, participant code 117433#. The DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) has been working on a proposal to improve the metadata support based on results of an earlier community-wide survey (Proposal to Update DC Registry and Add DCTERMS Registry). As the starting point for enhanced metadata support, DCAT is creating a proposal that would lay the foundation for future improvements by updating the existing Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) schema to the current Qualified Dublin Core (QDC) standard. The proposal also includes some suggestions for improving the protection of the schema standards as well as laying the groundwork for some added flexibility to add other standards. In folding this work into the DSpace Futures initiative, DCAT is hopeful everyone with an interest in improving metadata support in DSpace will get involved with the effort. 

• Meeting Notes
• Interested Participants: 
  • DCAT members
  • Monica Rivero, Rice University
  • Yanan Zhao, The University of Auckland
    
    

Roles and Responsibilities

Although each initiative is welcome to define their own roles and reorganize themselves as they see fit, DuraSpace anticipates the following initial roles:

• Lead / Co-Leads
  
  • The initiative "lead" would help to convene regular meetings amongst all interested participants and developers.
  • Would help to build consensus around use cases and requirements
  • Would strive to keep the initiative moving forward.
  • The role is an "initiative management" role. The individual(s) need not be technical.
• Steering Committee (optional)
  
  • Ideally, a committee would be formed to help support the "lead" in the goals of building consensus and ensuring the initiative stays on track.
  • Again, committee members need not be technical, but should have a good grasp of the problem at hand.
• Developer Team
  
  • Would help to develop, test and release the actual code
  • Would communicate directly with the Lead and/or Steering Committee around use cases and requirements
  • Ideally, each developer would have approval from their workplace to spend a percentage of their time on the initiative
  • Ideally, at least one existing DSpace Committer would be on this team.
• DuraSpace
  • Would attend regular meetings and contribute to consensus building 
  • Would offer perspective from other initiatives and projects, and help ensure cross-communication between initiatives and with the DSpace Committer Team 
  • Would provide necessary infrastructure: conference line, wiki space, JIRA, GitHub, etc.
    
  • Provide administrative support for any fund raising required
  • Provide and contribute to communication channels for project awareness, status, etc.