Dear all, When DSpace was conceived Dublin Core was placed at the heart of the software. This resulted in nice tools characterised by their easy of use and simplicity. In the past years many users struggled with this simplicity (Andrea Bollini, Federico Meschini, DSpace: Evolution from an Intelligent Design, DSUG Bergen, 2006 - Lieven Droogmans, Ben Bosman, Customizing DSpace for a large research university, DSUG Bergen, 2006 - Susanna Mornati, Andrea Bollini, New opportunities for Institutional Repositories: the evaluation challenge. A case study DSUG 2007, Rome - PAUWELS Benoit, DISpace, ULB-Brussels).
The submission module was kept very simple because of the simplicity of Dublin Core. What at the beginning looked very attractive became very quickly problematic. In our own University repository (Document [EMAIL PROTECTED]) and in OceanDocs, we were confronted with bad formatted metadata. This was first of all the case for the identifier.citation field. Submitters need a better structure to enter the metadata. Also, the crosswalk tool is very nice, but with more granular data available other OAI metadata formats can be made better. Benoit Pauwels and his team at ULB, Brussels did an interesting analyse of the metadata based on document type. This analyse was used by us to customize DSpace for Document [EMAIL PROTECTED] and OceanDocs. But now we want to focus on the submission module of DSpace. We propose to develop an alternative submission module extending the possibilities of the actual one. We can define three parts which can be developed separately: 1. A flexible framework: This is our first target (see further) 2. Granularity of metadata: This item outreaches the submission module, but has to be resolved too. DSpace has many advantages. One of them is the easiness to add extra fields. But they are DC-defined (or at least on a two-level basis). On the database level this is not relevant. It is only important to have DC-formatted metadata on the level of the OAI-module. People are solving this problem in different ways: Agris DSpace rewrites the code to use the language element, people are using extra fields. I have seen dc.citation.title etc., we use dc.bibliographicCitation.title etc. There is also the problem of one-to-one relations (e.g; author and unique ID). A standardized approach should be preferable. 3. Submitters support: The Thesaurus add-on is already available. The Agris DSpace group will work on extending the functionality and on other types of authority control: author names - serials - ... We will participate in this development too. A flexible framework: The DSpace submission module is limited but at the same time has already many interesting features. The metadata pages can be adapted and new ones can be added. The field choices and presentation can be customized. Also I understand that in version 1.5 the steps can even be better defined. But I still miss the adaptability of the metadata pages and some extra formatting options. The actual steps in DSpace are as follows: 1. Initial questions 2. Metadata pages 3. Upload 4. Verify 5. Creative Commons (optional) 6. License Agreement We propose the following model: 1. Metadata pages (with the possibility to create in one page the option of different templates (with tabs) 2. Upload (with the possibility to add multiple files) 3. Verify 4. Creative Commons (optional) 5. License Agreement This framework can be used for the classical DSpace but also if you want to refine your metadata and add extra functionality (authority control). We already developed a submission procedure based on document type for DSpace 1.4 (See Annex 1). Basically, we only extended the functionality of the submission part of DSpace 1.4.x. We want to port this approach, (refined and not only type-based) to version 1.5 as a plug-in or as an alternative module. See for more information at: http://www.uhasselt.be/bibliotheek/dspace/dspace.htm We like to receive comments and suggestions on this proposal. Also if people are interested to cooperate or to test out our developments, they are always welcome. Regards Denys Slipetskyy, Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, Sevastopol, Ukraine - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marc Goovaerts, Hasselt University, Belgium - [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ DSpace-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech
