Date & Time
- April 14th 15:00 UTC/GMT - 11:00 ET
Dial-in
We will use the international conference call dial-in. Please follow directions below.
- U.S.A/Canada toll free: 866-740-1260, participant code: 2257295
- International toll free: http://www.readytalk.com/intl
- Use the above link and input 2257295 and the country you are calling from to get your country's toll-free dial in #
- Once on the call, enter participant code 2257295
Agenda
We will start with the three questions which we agreed to cover in our last meeting:
What are the top features of DSpace you use at least once a week
What are some of the features you do not use at all
As an administrator, which things do you really need to have both Configurable in the UI + take effect immediately without the need for a Tomcat restart. If you need some inspiration on this one, take a look at the administrator use cases.
Subsequently we will discuss following UI related questions, feeding into the ongoing DSpace roadmap work:
- What is of interest to you in a UI? (use cases / features / needs)
- What do we keep? What can we do better?
- What would your ideal UI look like?
We will finish off with a request for assistance to finalise the list of
Use Cases we created last year. Some of these have to be edited or further elaborated.
Preparing for the call
Please prepare the abovementioned questions in advance of the meeting. You can leave your answer to those questions in a comment below. In case you can not attend the meeting but would like to share your opinion, feel free to leave a comment as well.
Meeting notes
Part 1: Core functionalities of DSpace
Following are non exhaustive lists based on the outcomes of our discussion. The goal of this part of the meeting was to list the main features in DSpace. The underlying idea is when we improve those features the overal admin user experience will increase.
Which admin features are used most often:
- Editing metadata
- Eperson management and authorization: This, however, still is a labour intensive process in most cases. Adding Epersons to certain groups is often done manually.
Which features are seldom used:
We went over this question rather quickly. It was clear that nearly all of the mentioned features are relatively new and might still need to find their way in.
One of those less used features in DSpace are curation tasks. The reason why this is not often used might be that those are not very well organised, which hampers the work.
Another feature is the versioning feature. This one has the limitation that the versioning form is the same as the submission form, while admins usually try to keep submission forms as easy as possible, but require a more elaborate form for versioning.
What should be configurable in the admin UI (Without having to reboot afterwards):
- Themes: admins should be able to select different themes for each collection or community without requiring any technical assistance from developers. They should be able to adapt the basic look and feel of the communities and collections they're in charge of.
- Facets: Admins should be able to conveniently add or remove sidebar facets.
- Changing the submission forms: Admins can alter the metadata schema's, but not the fields included in the submission form itself. Also, it would be a great improvement if submission forms could be tailored to the collection one is submitting to.
Part 2: Most important UI functionalities
Which features should definitely remain in the UI:
- Sidebar facets
- Custom themes
Which features should be improved or created:
- Submissions: Still a lot of users find submitting to DSpace difficult. It would be great if we could further improve the ease of use for submissions.
- Visible relationships between bitstreams: this needs to be created as currently there is no way to visually indicate bitstream relatedness.
- Audiovisual content streaming: DSpace does not support the streaming of video or audio files. A lot of DSpace admins now have to rely on third party services to stream their audiovisual content. It would be convenient if such a feature is integrated in DSpace.
- item pages: Most visitors land on those pages after searching google or an other search engine. The bitstream download link could be displayed more clearly however. Also the item page itself could have a cleaner overview.
Call Attendees