Hello, I'm investigating options for a new research information system in our organization. Dspace-CRIS has been considered as one candidate. The prospect of merging research data with existing Dspace installation seems promising from the maintenance point of view, and especially the functionality implemented at the HKU Scholars Hub feels most impressive.
We have some quite specific CRIS requirements both related to validation of publication data (partially posed by the Ministry of Education so the same requirements apply to other institutions in Finland as well), and support for various workflows - especially related to tracking projects and grants. I managed to get test installation of Dspace-CRIS running, but I have some questions about the capabilities (or possibilities of customization with "reasonable" effort - our old system has been developed completely in-house so we are prepared to do some develepment and certainly collaborate with other organizations with similar needs as well) of the system. - The most pressing concern (since this seems to be currently handled better in commercial alternatives): is it feasible to implement customizable workflow processes related to CRIS entities that is separated from the normal Dspace submission process? This involves "validation" all all first-level CRIS entities in general (for example, librarian should check additions to journal items), and in its most involved form, project/grant management (=Pre- and Post-Award Process). The basic process should be like: 1. Researcher fills in some basic metadata about the project application (name, funders, partners, budget information, etc.) 2. For "large" projects, financial secretary checks the budget 3. For all projects, dept. head approves or rejects the application 4. If the application is approved, data about the funding decision and possibly spending would be imported from financial system. In most cases, financial secretary (or administrator) would link the financial data with project application (using the project code or other identifier). After the link has been made, new records (=e.g. funding decisions for different years) related to the project should be combined to earlier data automatically (based on the linked the project code). I assume that the data import or the actual data structure needed to represent this information is not a problem, and dept. heads or secretaries can probably be represented using the Dspace authorization groups, but what about the workflow (notifications, acceptance) functionality related to the process? There may be also documents (e.g. funding applications or decisions) related to the process, but since the actual entity we are interested in this case is the project - not the documents related to the project (in most cases, they contain confidential information anyway). - Another concern is related to the presentation and validation of publication information. While Dspace-CRIS allows using CRIS entities as authority (which is a great feature itself), the default submission form provided in Dspace seems somewhat restricted. For example, we would need - Custom submission forms depending on the type of the publication (e.g. journal articles, books, or conference papers need partially different visible fields and validation rules for) - Validation depending on values entered on multiple metadata fields. For example - if the publication is marked as "international collaborative publication" (a field required for national publication information in Finland), the author affiliations should be checked such that at least one author is from another, foreign organization. - Presentation of the list/tree values based on custom queries during data entry. For example, we would like to store all internal (=our departments) and external (=funders, collaborators) organizations in same, hierarchical structure, but depending on the context, only parts or this list should be visible/searchable. - A related concern with organizations involves presenting their time span - over time, departments are splitted or merged and in genral, have a start or end date. This should be reflected in validation as well (e.g. compare the publication year to organization's lifespan) Can (or should?) features like these be implemented on top of default Dspace submission process, or would it make sense to define a new kind for workflow functionality on top of Dspace-CRIS (perhaps related to project workflow mentioned in above point) since JDynA framework seems already support some of the required validation functionality? - The aspect of combining affiliation data to authors is still somewhat unclear to me. At the HKU Scholars Hub, affiliation data seems to be "wired" to author profiles (?), but we would need to differentiate the affiliation information in each publication (most importantly - has the author written a specific paper _as_ member of our organization or as "outsider" (preferably with some affiliation as well) - there are also cases with multiple affiliations (our university + other) and this should be tracked as well). In addition, the organizations used in affiliation data should be picked/matched from a larger organization list or tree (=so you could search for a given organization and get all persons, publications, grants and other information related to that organizations). Can this be done with Dspace-CRIS? From earlier conversations I noticed that the concept of "nested objects" might help - is there any documentation or additional data about the way they are defined/applied? - The feature list mentions that _second level_ cris entities can be added using the web ui. How about the expected amount of work for adding new first level entities (e.g. different kinds of achievements)? Is this mostly on configuration (hibernate files, form definitions?) issue or does this involve changes in the Dspace-CRIS code itself? - Are there plans to release the code (or documentation/guidelines) for "enhanced" submission process as described in OR2013 presentation (Integrate external bibliographic services in DSpace submission process)? The ability to import bibliographic metadata from external services (and preferably merge the data from various sources) is one of the central requirements for a new CRIS and the functionality described in the presentation seems to fare (or even surpass) the features offered by commercial competitors. best regards (and sorry for the lengthy post), -- Miika Nurminen University of Jyväskylä ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. 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