I don't know how universal this is, but it was present in both of our 
DSpace versions (3.x / 5.5).

Through unknown mechanisms, a few handles were created (or augmented) with 
blank metadatavalue(s). While normally this resulted in rows with just a 
"description" without "content", in a few scenarios, the results were 
problematic for the item display / layout.

For a few days, I will leave the following record in this broken state or 
until someone else can confirm it:

http://cardinalscholar.bsu.edu/handle/123456789/199623
http://cardinalscholar.bsu.edu/handle/123456789/199623?show=full (to see 
the blank fields)

This result is that the div#ds-options-wrapper gets added to ds-body pushing 
it beneath the main item details rather than floating to the right on a normal 
item <http://cardinalscholar.bsu.edu/handle/123456789/200097>. This was 
caused by adding the blank value for the metadata field "dc.description". 
(with or without "language" populated)

Additionally, I found that if there is a secondary, blank URL record that 
is meant to be shown in the simple view (in our case 
dc.identifier.cardcat-url) that it turns much of the text on the page into 
a clickable link which is not the intended / desired behavior.

IMPORTANTLY -- removing the 2 empty metadata fields resolves both layout 
conditions. Both conditions occur independently of the other.

What I propose is that if the ingest / import / metadata edit forms aren't 
meant to weed out these items, then deleting blank fields out of the 
metadatavalue table could be added to a clean-up scheduled task or simply 
reject the creation of blank values in a metadatavalue record. I presume 
there could be legitimate uses for blank values but I haven't thought of 
any.

Or, (less desirably) make the simple item view more robust to handle empty 
values.

*Can someone intimately familiar with the metadatavalue table* say whether 
and when it is safe to *delete *values directly out of metadatavalue if the 
field_value is empty? Isn't deletion out of that table the only thing that 
happens on the administrative edit "Item metadata" page?
I noticed there are various differences to metadatavalue between versions 3 
and 5 so any recommendations on safe deletion may need affixed to a version 
number.

The DB diagram doesn't appear to leave any dangling (metadata_value_id) 
foreign keys around for deleted metadatavalue rows but I could be wrong.

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