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DSpace 5 Upgrade

Posted on November 25, 2015 by

Through December 2015 and January 2016, Texas Digital Library (TDL) hosted DSpace repositories will begin an upgrade to DSpace 5. There will be no major changes to DSpace, just new features and bug fixes.

The TDL DSpace 5 Working Group institutions will be upgraded first, the week of December 7th:

  • Angelo State University
  • Texas A&M Galveston
  • Texas A&M International
  • Texas Tech University

In mid-January, the remaining TDL hosted DSpace repositories at member institutions will be upgraded to DSpace 5.

DSpace 5 includes a number of new features and updates, outlined below. In addition, the TDL DSpace 5 Working Group will be presenting a “DSpace 5 Release Webinar” on Monday, December 7, 2015 from 1:00pm – 2:00pm. The webinar will be recorded and available in the TDL Repository. A second webinar will be held in January, with date and time to be determined.

New Features and Updates

Page Not Found Bug Fix
  • When a user selects a page that is no longer there, a 404 Error is returned. In previous versions of DSpace the page was a simple statement of “Resource not found” that looked like a more serious error. This bug fix now shows “Page cannot be found. Go to DSpace home. Please contact the site administrator if you wish to report this error. If possible, please provide details about what you were doing at the time this error occurred.”
PDF Thumbnail Generation
  • PDF thumbnails are now generated from the first page of the first PDF file in the item upload. PDFs are generated in the nightly batch job when the DSpace media filter process is run. This process also generates the OCR bitstreams, thumbnails of regular images, and updates the search index.
  • Thumbnails for primary files will now be “clickable”, generating a download of the primary file
 Google Analytics from DSpace Admin UI
  • In each digital item page, the feature “View Google Analytics Statistics” is available at the bottom of the right navigation menu. The feature pulls statistics of page views from Google Analytics, and display the usage statistics by month.
  • It allows administrators to select time range, but the usage statistics will still be grouped into month for display. It provides succinct and direct views on usage statistics.
  • The same page of Google Analytics Usage Statistics contains another section called “File Downloads.” It provides insights of the “true” usage on digital items. For example, a page gets 200 page views but only 20 file downloads, indicating only the 20 visits are “true” usage of this digital item.
Batch Upload via DSpace UI
  • Used to require command-line actions
  • Now: much more user-friendly for those without programming experience
  • Still needs file/directory arrangement as in the old command-line process
  • Each Item in your batch upload has a folder containing the item’s bitstreams, a metadata file, a license, and contents file.
  • The “contents” file is a tab-delimited text file.
    • You can create it in Notepad, then delete .txt extension from the filename
    • If you don’t delete .txt, DSpace will not recognize the file
  • DSpace 5.x now has the ability to import items (photos, PDFs, etc.) AND metadata directly from the Graphical User Interface from a DSpace Administrator user from a zip file.
  • Documentation for this is available at: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSDOC5x/Importing+and+Exporting+Items+via+Simple+Archive+Format
MathJax
ORCid
  • Unique ID that researchers/other users can sign up for
  • DSpace 5 release comes with an ORCid lookup option for author and editor, which is supposed to create a dc field so you can look people up by ORCid
  • You do not have to use it and can still add authors and editors in the usual way
  • If you choose to use the ORCid, make sure that you have the correct person/id
  • Clicking the ORCid number will bring up a pop-up window so you can view that person’s information
Sherpa/RoMEO
  • RoMEO is a database of publishers’ policies “regarding the self-archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories”
  • You must use the ISSN for the RoMEO policies to appear
  • A color coded system is used to identify the publisher’s policies
  • If you submit more than 500 requests per day from one IP address, you will need to register for a free account
Performance Improvement
  • “Select Collection” drop down in submission process
    • The “select collection” step in the DSpace workflow had a bug that caused it to perform badly when a large number of collections existed
    • As per the documentation: https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-682 this bug has been fixed
Video and Audio
  • MP3 Embedded Player
    • This feature embeds HTML5 player for audio files in each digital item
    • Variety of audio formats are compatible with the player
    • Usually the first audio file is displayed at the view of “Simple Item Record”
    • At the view of “Full Item Record,” the audio files will be positioned in line at the bottom with some simple metadata.
    • Description with the bitstreams can be provided to identify each file.
    • Click “View/Open” to download the file.
  • Video Player
    • The programming team at TDL has developed a HTML5 video player for DSpace 5.0
    • It has all the essential features for a video player: sound adjustment, full-screen capability, etc.
    • The player supports all file types that HTML5 supports, but .avi, .mov, .mp4, .asf, and .wmv are recommended
    • It is also recommended that the uploaded videos be around 15 frames per second, at anywhere between 320×240 to 1080×720 resolution
    • Batch uploading videos is possible with DSpace 5, but depending on file sizes it could be a lengthy process (schedule jobs accordingly)
  • Considerations for Videos
    • Starting with the new DSpace 5 implementation, there will be 250gb cap on server space and any additional space will have to be purchased. 
    • Members will want to consider size of files as they begin uploading video for playback
    • The video player has issues supporting all MME types at the moment
    • For videos with multiple parts, only the first part will load in the video player, subsequent parts will open in an installed video player on the computer
    • The TDL programming team is planning enhancements to the video player later this year
OAI-PMH and Openaire
  • The OAI-PMH Interface may be used by other systems to harvest metadata records from your DSpace. There have been several bug fixes (including the QDC list records issue seen in DSpace 4.x) to the OAI data so they should now following the correct OAI standard.
  • Here is the link for the DSpace 5.x Documentation on OAI PMH Harvesting
    https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSDOC5x/OAI
  • To View your OAI data from your DSpace server, input the following URL into the browser specifying your specific DSpace server information. For example:
    https://YOURSERVER.tdl.org/YOURSERVER-oai/request?verb=Identify
  • To see if you server is validated on the OAI standards goto:
    http://validator.oaipmh.com/
  • Put in your OAI address for validation, and run the validation check ie:
    https://dspace-test.tdl.org/test-oai/request
  • This version of DSpace has been updated for the European Openaire standard as well. TDL has verified test server has passed their verification server.
EZID for DOIs
  • There is ongoing work to integrate EZID/DOIs into DSpace for TDL members
  • DSpace 5 will support EZID integration and implementation of DOIs for each item
  • TDL consortium members will now receive a discount on EZID memberships
  • DOIs will be tied to handles, but fully functional
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