We will use the international conference call dial-in. Please follow directions below.
For many institutions, the OAI-PMH interface is a key feature of DSpace, sometimes even a central driver for establishing an institutional repository.
This interface enables your repository to provide metadata to Initiatives such as OpenAIRE, RIOXX, SHARE, DART Europe, BASE-SEARCH and OAISTER (now part of WorldCat)
Even though the protocol has been stable for many years, the DSpace implementation has evolved. The most important milestone was a complete rewrite of the DSpace OAI code back in DSpace 3, where also a web UI was added so administrators can easily preview results exposed through this interface: http://demo.dspace.org/oai/request?verb=Identify
Despite the popularity and the massive uptake of this feature, a number of issues remain to be addressed by the DSpace community.
Friedrich Summann will join us in this call, representing the perspective of BASE-SEARCH, a large scale OAI-PMH harvester. He will share a number of issues that are consistently coming up while trying to harvest old and new installations of DSpace.
The goal of the discussion is that we clearly identify and list issues affecting the OAI-PMH implementation of DSpace and that we identify those use cases to make OAI-PMH in DSpace even more user friendly for Repository managers and external harvesters.
Tim Donohue will bring us up to speed on the latest news concerning the future of DSpace UI.
Who is attending the Open Repositories conference in Dublin (June 13-16th)?
To which topics should we dedicate this opportunity to meet face to face?
Let's talk about OAI
Consider following questions in preparation of the call:
Open Repositories 2016 Dublin
Are you attending/planning to attend the conference? What would you like to discuss during the week?
Friedrich Summann joined the meeting to present some of the most common pitfalls he noticed in harvesting numerous Open Access repositories to populate the BASE-SEARCH initiative. Although some 1000 DSpace's are properly configured for harvesting and indexing. For about 200 DSpace repositories base did encounter some issues. Mr. Summann lists the following problems:
Document that describes these issues in detail, including examples: http://bit.ly/BASE-SEARCH-OAI-issues-DSpace
OAISTER/Worldcat only supports HTTP, it does not support HTTPS. This problem was overcome on DSpaceDirect by configuring OAI to go through HTTP, while leading all other traffic through HTTPS.
The question rises if it would be possible to hide a collection for OAI-PMH. In case a collection is already access restricted in your own repository the contents will also not be harvested by OAI-PMH. It is possible the collection's name will be harvested, and thus be visible in the harvesting repository or platform. The contents of that collection on the other hand, will not be visible.
A prototyping challenge was held to prototype new UI technologies, as there already was a consensus the future of the DSpace UI lays neither with JSPUI nor XMLUI. In January all the candidate technologies were demonstrated. Since last week there is a group digging deeper in the different technologies, looking mainly for similarities.
However, the final decision for a technology is yet to be made. This will be discussed during next week's DuraSpace summit. One of the main points of disagreement is the question whether to stick to a server-side approach, or move on to a client-side approach using for example a javascript framework.
The DSpace UI working group has already agreed there is a need for User Experience (UX) expert who can help improve the end user experience. In case you have such a person in-house, who would be able to contribute to the new UI's user experience, feel free to get in touch with the working group.
As the conference program is already tight scheduled, we will try to have a short meeting over lunch.
DCAT members are free to suggest topics of interest. Currently an interest in discussing Statistics & Analytics is the only one addressed.