DSpace Community Annual Report2017 – July 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS
SUMMARY			1
USER COMMUNITY		3

MEMBERSHIP			4
COMMUNITY PROFILES		5

TECHNICAL OVERVIEW		

8

GOVERNANCE, FINANCE		

9

EVENTS				10DSpace Annual Report 			1

SUMMARY
DSpace is a community-based, open source projectthat produces the DSpace repository platform. Witha 16-year history, strong membership support, andactive participation from a wide variety of stakeholder
institutions located all over the world. 2017-2018 was ayear of progress toward the key community priority ofdeveloping and releasing DSpace 7 with a new, single
Angular user interface and enhanced REST API. The
DSpace Steering and Leadership Group has directed
this work. This governing body is made up of repre-

The bulk of technical efforts
were focused on DSpace 7
which included a great deal ofgroundwork and foundation
support for the new REST API.
Plans for a Beta release of
DSpace 7 with support for entities
are on track for early 2019.
sentatives from member institutions with input from
community groups including, the DSpace Community
Action Team (DCAT), the DSpace Committers, andthe DSpace 7 UI Outreach Group who contributed toand promoted work on DSpace7 throughout 2017.
The DSpace Steering and Leadership Group continued
to increase its engagement in leading the community.
This governance group met regularly via teleconference throughout the year and twice in person to makeprogress on key initiatives outlined in the 2015-2018
community-developed Strategic Plan including growing and maintaining an active user and developer
community around the DSpace open source product,sustaining the existing user base and ensuring both the2

DSpace open source product and our community remain vibrant for years to come, and advancing DSpacetechnology based on a shared vision. As a community-based project, DSpace depends on the Steering andLeadership Group to represent the needs of more than
2,000 stakeholder institutions around the world who
use DSpace.
The technical roadmap for 2017 focused on DSpace
7 development. As a production repository DSpace
needs to meet the needs of large and small stakeholder
institutions, so minor updates were released as needed. At the same time the bulk of technical efforts werefocused on DSpace 7 which included a great deal ofgroundwork and foundation support for the new REST
API. Plans for a Beta release of DSpace 7 with support
for entities are on track for early 2019.
At the end of 2017 the DSpace community identified
the increasing strategic importance of Current Research Information Systems (CRISs) and Institutional
Repositories (IRs) for higher education and research
institutions as a way to foster research and innovation and to provide a faster and broader technology
transfer to industry and society. The DSpace Entities
Working Group was convened in 2017 to investigate
possible solutions that would enable DSpace to support, manage and relate entities. Based on the workof the DSpace Entities Working Group, in June 2018the DSpace Steering Group strongly recommended
that the DSpace 7 data model be expanded to support
new object types (entities) to provide these immediate
benefits: alignment with the COAR Next Generation
Repositories recommendations (especially around
identifiers, e.g. ORCID), compliance with OpenAIRE
v4 guidelines, and ensuring that DSpace stays current
and competitive with other repository solutions while
being interoperable with existing research information
systems.
Building and sustaining a strong community is acentral goal for the DSpace Project. To this end, training webinars and user group meetings were offeredthroughout the year; see the complete list in the Events
section at the end of the report.

USER COMMUNITY
The DSpace Community is the broadest open source
repository community globally. In the DSpace User
Registry (registry.duraspace.org/registry/dspace) there
are 2445 registered instances of DSpace. There may
be many more DSpace instances running of which weare not aware. At the beginning of 2018 DuraSpace
launched a campaign to clean and update the data in
our registry, asking the community to check the datato confirm that the information was correct and stillvalid, or update. We thank the hundreds of community members who took the time to update their data
and take this opportunity to ask the ones who havenot done this yet to take a few minutes to check theirinformation. The registry is a useful tool for the community. Each entry shows country, use cases, type ofcontent, and technical information such as the version
being used. As a community resource, it allows users
to to contact peers and share ideas and best practices.

DSpace around the world
The map below gives a geographic representation of
the regions where DSpace is currently implemented.
There are very few regions in which DSpace is not
being used. DuraSpace is interested in better understanding commonalities and differences in the use of
DSpace based on the different regions of the world inorder to be able to offer a better support to the users
and the community and to facilitate the exchange ofbest practices.

Where in the World are DSpace Repositories?

DSpace Annual Report 			3

Number of Registered Installations and Geographic Distribution.

MEMBERSHIP

4

The list of DuraSpace members supporting DuraSpace's effort to advance the design, development
and sustainability of DSpace grew in 2017-2018. We
welcomed the CINECA, ETH Zurich/ETH Library,
Naval Postgraduate School, University of Stirling,
Qatar University, bringing the member total to 60. The
majority of our members come from the United States,
but DSpace membership now includes institutions
from more countries. This geographical diversity isparticularly represented in the Governance of DSpace,
where members from ten different countries are represented.

Brandeis University
Copenhagen Business Library
Creighton University
Dalhousie University Libraries
George Mason University
Georgetown University
Gothenburg University Library
Griffith University
Laval University - Université Laval
Malmo University
Naval Postgraduate School
New Jersey State Library
Oakland University, Kresge Library
Qatar University
Scottish Digital Library ConsortiumState University of New York
Université de Montréal
University of Adelaide
University of Auckland
University of Hawaii at Manoa
University of Hong Kong
University of Illinois
University of Liege
University of Maryland
University of Oslo
University of Ottawa
University of Stirling
University of Technology Sydney
University of Texas at Dallas
University of Victoria
University of Waterloo
Utrecht University
Vanderbilt University Library
Vrije University Amsterdam
Wake Forest University
Washington State University Libraries
World Bank Group
Youngstown State University

The full list of DuraSpace members supporting DSpace
includes:Platinum $20,000
Texas Digital LibraryGold $10,000
Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, I.P.
Indiana University Purdue University		Indianapolis
The National Library of Finland
The Ohio State University
University of British Columbia
University of Cambridge
University of Minnesota
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Silver $5,000
CINECAETH Zurich, ETH Library
Georgia Tech Library
Imperial College London
University of Calgary
University of Edinburgh
University of Kansas
University of Manitoba

Bronze $2,500
Auburn University Libraries

Other
East Carolina University, Joyner Library
McMaster University
University of Oklahoma Libraries
DSpace Annual Report 			5

COMMUNITY PROFILES
The most common use of the DSpace software is by academic and research libraries as an open access repository for managing faculty and student outputs. There
are also many organizations using the software to hostand manage subject based, datasets, or media-based
repositories. The following profiles of two member institutions, one an academic library in the United States,
and the other a national library in Europe, highlightthe flexibility of DSpace in meeting diverse institutional requirements.

Georgetown University

Terry Brady, Salwa Ismail
What strategic organizational or institutional goals did DSpace help
you meet?
Georgetown University Library is an agile organizationthat respects the heritage of the past while anticipating
the requirements of the 21st century. One of our goals
in support of this mission is to develop flexible and innovative spaces, both physical and virtual, that encourage research, teaching, learning, and collaboration, andthat extend the library's services and collections to theglobal community. DSpace, which is one of the technological tools in the Library’s repertoire, has helped
us achieve the goal of being able to provide a dynamic
and innovative virtual space that helps us showcase
our vibrant digital collections and campus scholarship.
The engaged community and robust features of DSpace
provide a powerful platform for scholarly communications, which helps the Library meet its goal of actively
providing creative tools and employing collaborative partnerships to enhance teaching and learning.
DSpace’s integration with SHERPA/RoMeo, ability toprovide statistics, easy ingest workflows among otherfeatures posits to help our Library meet its technologically innovative goals, which are in turn aligned withthe goals of our University.
Why did you decide on DSpace?
We made a decision to be really good at one repository
rather than having multiple repositories for separate
purposes. While many folks do not think of DSpace asa platform for digital collections, we have been delighted at what we have been able to accomplish. We haveintegrated a streaming audio player, a streaming video
player, and a IIIF image viewer into our repository.
6

Each tool that we build to support our IR content istransferable to our digital collections. We also wanted
to support open software and platforms and be involved in platform that is developed by the community for the community over an off-the-shelf product.
DSpace is a great platform that shows how an active
community can shape the development of its products
and ensure that they are well positioned to meet thecommunity’s ever evolving and changing needs.
What deployment advice would you give others in the community?
Many features of DSpace are easy to implement using
just configuration files or simple changes to the theme
layer. If you are getting started, create a test environment and practice building and deploying changes
to the system. With each change you implement, it
becomes much easier to understand how to further
enhance the system. We have found that a little workon the theme layer and on the search facets has created a satisfying experience for our collection owners.
DSpace has a robust set of tools for ingesting content
into the repository. Be sure to learn about the bulk
metadata and Simple Archive Format ingest processes.
The community is very eager to help. If you encountera challenge, reach out and be persistent. Someone in
the community has likely experienced the same issue
in the past. Get involved. If you are running a DSpace
instance, you are more than qualified to participate.
The community would appreciate your involvement.
What are your roles with DSpace at your institution?
Terry Brady is a Senior Software Developer at Georgetown University Library with the lead role for development of DigitalGeorgetown, which is built on DSpace.
Terry is also a committer for the DSpace project.
Salwa Ismail is the Head of Library Information Technology for Georgetown University Library. Salwa wasthe chair of the DSpace Steering Group and DSpace
Leadership Group from 2017-2018.

The National Library of Finland (NLF)
Samu Viita

Your role with DSpace at your institution
Samu Viita works at the National Library of Finland(NLF), in a unit which is called Library Network Services. His work concentrates mainly on technical sideof things, including programming and DSpace maintenance. He also does customer service, communication

and training sessions forour customers.
Why did you decide on DSpace?
When I came onboard in2006, DSpace was alreadyin the early stages of use
and testing. I helped
to further evaluate andtest DSpace for about 6
months. Prior to using
DSpace the library had
been using a proprietary
software platform that did
not really meet our needs.
The conclusions were that
DSpace would be the mosthelpful for meeting ourorganizational requirements for the long term.
One important factor was
the out-of-the-box natureof DSpace, as we didn’t have resources and time tostart from scratch with e.g. Fedora. Another importantfactor was the Manakin (XML UI) interface, which wasjust in an alpha stage when we adopted it. It enabled
us to make separate interfaces for different customers
within one DSpace instance like Doria. A third important factor was that the software was open source.
DSpace was probably the first major open source software platform used at the National Library. I think thatthe choice we made at the time has proven to be right,
as we probably wouldn’t have repository services at thislevel without DSpace. And I think that good experiences we have had with DSpace may have encouragedsome of our other projects (like Finna and Finto) toinvest in the development of open source software.
What strategic organizational or institutional goals did DSpace help
you meet?
The most important goal for our repository services
is to provide permanent online access to many kindsof interesting materials produced in Finland. These
include scholarly publications, cultural heritage materials and publications of the Finnish public sector
organizations.

Attendees at the DuraSpace-euroCRIS Interoperability
Event focused on interoperability between DSpace repository and CRIS held on June 13, 2018 (in advanceof the CRIS 2018 Conference in Umeå, Sweden).
As an open-source-based, out-of-the-box softwarethat has good import functions and customizable userinterfaces DSpace has been an excellent basis for building our repository services. With these functionalities
it has been possible to make the service attractive andreliable enough to be adapted widely at so many Finnish organizations.
This wide adoption has also had one positive side
effect: It’s easier to find information on many topics.
For example, before services like Theseus or Valto, theuniversities of applied sciences and the Finnish ministries had their own websites where they published their
theses or publications. Now all of them can be found in
one place and they have same metadata schema to help
information retrieval. And eventually taxpayers get
more with less money spent.

DSpace Annual Report 			7

TECHNICAL OVERVIEW
After the DSpace Steering Group formally selected Angular as the new platform for the next DSpace UI, theDSpace 7 Working Group was established to formalize
the process of building a new Angular user interface (UI) and REST API
for the DSpace 7.0 release.
Early in 2017, this DSpace 7 teamconcentrated on planning the architecture (especially for the enhanced
REST API) and building the "framework" for the Angular UI.
In parallel, a DSpace 7 UI Outreach Group was established to help
with outreach, and update/capture
use cases needed to be met by the
new UI. This group also created aplain-language summary of DSpace 7
decisions and features.
In late 2017, the DSpace Entities Working Groupwas established to analyze options for enhancing theDSpace data model with additional "entities" (objects)
for improved integration with CRIS systems and external identifier systems such as ORCiD. Key goals of thiseffort were to achieve better alignment with the COAR
Next Generation Repositories recommendations(especially around identifiers) and compliance with
OpenAIRE v4 guidelines. The analysis of this working
group started from an in-depth analysis of DSpaceCRIS and resulted in the suggestion to reengineer
entities in the core code and in a subsequent recommendation by the DSpace Steering Group to expand
the DSpace 7 data model to include new, configurable
entities. The effort to build and implement these configurable entities continues in 2018.
Throughout 2017 and into 2018, DSpace 7 development has ramped up, and training/learning opportunities and resources have become more widespread.
The DSpace 7 Working Group has established ongoing
DSpace 7 Community Sprints, allowing existing andnew developers to virtually contribute to and learn
DSpace 7 technologies in a hands-on, collaborative
fashion. The first sprint, (in May 2018, resulted in 14
pull requests from 12 developers, two of whom had
8

not previously contributed to DSpace. Additionally,
the Committers team, led by Terry Brady, establishedongoing DSpace Developer Show & Tell meetings, toallow for virtual knowledge sharing among our widespread developer community.

DSpace committers attending the Open Repositories
Conference 2018 in Bozeman, Montana.
The DSpace 7 Working Group is split into two subteams: an Angular Subteam, led by Art Lowel (Atmire),
which is concentrating on building a modern, responsive, client-side user interface using Angular, and a
REST API Subteam, led by Andrea Bollini (4Science),
which is concentrating on building a new REST API
based on state-of-art technologies, standards and bestpractices.
In June, at OR2018, DSpace 7 developer workshops
were led by Angular UI and REST API subteams
leaders about the new REST API and Angular UI.
Additionally, a detailed DSpace 7 roadmap update waspresented, including a recorded demo of DSpace 7
progress and new features. The DSpace 7 final releaseis estimated for early 2019, with a public beta version
preceeding it in late 2018.

GOVERNANCE, FINANCE

Progress on Key Initiatives

The DSpace Leadership Group is made up of representatives from institutions that contribute funding and/or in-kind effort to the project. The Leadership Groupapproves the overall priorities and strategic directionof projects by approving the annual budget and product roadmap, nominating and electing Steering Group
members, voting on key decisions presented by theSteering Group, and helping to raise funds and secureother resources on behalf of DSpace. The LeadershipGroup meets virtually once a month and once a year
in person.

• Recorded demonstration of DSpace 7 progress / newfeatures: https://youtu.be/yKnos2jTdSQThe DSpace Steering Group is an elected body of nine
representatives voted from the Leadership Group.
The Steering Group provides project oversight andensures that the priorities of the Leadership Group andmembers are met by providing guidance to the Technical Lead and Committers Group, recommendingan annual budget, and presenting key decisions to the
Leadership Group for discussion and approval. The
Steering Group meets virtually once per month andmeets in person annually as part of the larger Leadership Group.

• Public DSpace 7 demo sites–UI demo site: 			
https://dspace7-demo.atmire.com/

The 2017 membership campaign set of goal of raising$257,500 to fund the DSpace project, including staff,
travel, marketing and meetings and infrastructure.
We concluded the membership drive with $239,500 in
funding, which is 94% of our goal. The detailed financial breakdown is below:

Technical accomplishments:• OR2018 DSpace 7 Roadmap update: http://tinyurl.
com/or2018-dspace7• OR2018 Workshops on DSpace 7:--REST API: http://tinyurl.com/or2018-dspace-rest--Angular UI: http://tinyurl.com/or2018-dspace-ui• REST API demo site: https://dspace7.4science.it/
dspace-spring-rest/• Plain language summary of technology decisions
behind DSpace 7• DSpace 7 Community Sprints (ongoing)• DSpace Developer Show & Tell meetings (ongoing)• Service providers: DuraSpace Service Provid-		
ers have made an investment in our open technologies
and a commitment to work cooperatively with DuraSpace to best serve the community of users: https://duraspace.org/community/service-providers/

Financials

January 2017 - 31 December 2017 Summary:
Net income from above: $50,523

DSpace Annual Report 			9munity the possibility to share ideas, best practices anduse cases at a Regional level (in this specific case, theUS Region) and, at the same time, to present the visionand roadmap for the new DSpace 7 UI project. There
were 39 attendees from 22 different institutions at theTraining webinars, user group meetings, and show and meeting and the discussion was vibrant and engaging.
tell events were held throughout 2017 and 2018 to
There were sections for DSpace Developers to discussbuild a strong and sustainable DSpace community. Du- technical issues, and there were conversations led by
raSpace webinar slides and recordings may be found
Repository Managers dealing with managerial andon the DuraSpace webinars page: https://duraspace.
organizational processes, integration and interoperaorg/webinar/bility, assessment and metrics.

EVENTS

2017

September 21, 2017 - The Library Code GmbH, theUniversitätsbibliothek Stuttgart and the Fraunhofer
February 28, 2017 - “Introducing DSpace 7”, a commu- Informationszentrum Raum und Bau IRB organized
nity webinar presented by Claire Knowles, Tim Dono- in Stuttgart the 4th edition of the DSpace Anwenderhue, Art Lowel, & Andrea Bollini.
treffen (German-speaking DSpace User Group meeting). More than 70 attendees from all over Germany
March 7, 2017 - “DSpace for Data: issues, solutions and and Switzerland gathered together to share ideas andchallenges”, a community webinar presented by Claire
best practices about the use of DSpace. Among the
Knowles, Ryan Scherle & Pauline Ward.
interesting topics discussed there were: the future of
DSpace and its single UI expected with DSpace 7;
March 15, 2017 - “How to contribute to DSpace –be a DSpace-CRIS and the use of repository as researchpart of the team!”, a community webinar presented byinformation management tools; research data; ORCiD
Claire Knowles, Maureen Walsh, Bram Luyten, Hardy
integration; interoperability with external systems, etc.
Pottinger, & Kim Shepherd.
May 17, 2017 - A UK and Ireland DSpace User Group
Meeting held at the University of Cambridge.
June 15, 2017 - “DSpace-CRIS: How it works and how
to leverage it”, a community webinar presented by
Susanna Mornati, Andrea Bollini (4Science) introduced DSpace-CRIS and its flexible and extensible data
model, which allows for the creation and managementof various kinds of entities.
June 20, 2017 - DuraSpace and Atmire offered a free
DSpace User Group Meeting prior to the OAI10 conference in Geneva.
June 27-30, 2017 - Workshops and sessions on Angular
UI development for DSpace, DSpace-CRIS, DSpaceextensions and integrations presented by DuraSpace,
Atmire, 4Science and other contributors at the Open
Repositories 2017 conference in Brisbane, Australia.
August 22-23, 2017 - The Georgetown University Library hosted a DSpace North American User Meetingin Washington. The idea was to offer the DSpace Com10

2018
February 27, 2018 - The first meeting in the new
DSpace Developer Show and Tell series focused on
AWS, Janitor and DSpace (.
March 27, 2018 - DSpace Developer Show and Tellmeeting - Janitor and DSpace, DSpace Development
on Codenvy.
April 17, 2018 - DSpace Developer Show and Tellmeeting - IDE Showcase .
April 24, 2018 - “Making DSpace Your Own”, a community webinar presented by Terry Brady, Georgetown
University Library.
May 15, 2018 - DSpace Developer Show and Tellmeeting - Using Docker in Development.
June 3-7, 2018 - Workshops and sessions on DSpace 7
REST API, Angular UI development, Demo and RoadMap, DSpace extensions and integrations presented by
DuraSpace, Atmire, 4Science and other contributors

at the Open Repositories 2018conference in Bozeman, Montana.
June 13, 2018 - DuraSpace and
euroCRIS co-hosted a one-day
event in Umeå, Sweden in advance of the CRIS 2018 Conference to focus on interoperability
between DSpace repository and
CRIS systems and bring the two
communities together.
4Science offered a free workshop on DSpace-CRIS
with presentations from various
users.
June 26, 2018 - DSpace Developer Show and Tell meeting OR 2018 Recap.
July 3, 2018 - Atmire held a DSpace User Group Meeting at The Repository Fringe Conference in Edinburgh.
July 18, 2018 - DuraSpace and CONCYTEC (the Peruvian National Council for Science, Technology and Innovation) organized the first DSpace workshop in Peru
as a pre-conference event during the National Conference on Research Information (website). Together with
the DSpace training session delivered by Joan Caparros
from CSUC (the Catalan Consortium of University),
there was a presentation about COAR’s Next Generation Repositories and how DSpace is implementing
such recommendations and the afternoon was dedicated to a training on DSpace-CRIS provided by 4Science.
There were over 160 attendees and 120 more followed
the event online.

Attendees at the first DSpace workshop in Peru, apre-conference event during the National Conference.
Michele Mennielli (DuraSpace)
Carol Minton Morris (DuraSpace)
Kristi Searle (DuraSpace)
Samu Viita (National Library of Finland)

Contributors to the DSpace Annual ReportThanks to:
Terry Brady (Georgetown University)
Claudio Cortese (4Science)
Tim Donohue (DuraSpace)
Felicity Dykas (University of Missouri)
Valorie Hollister (DuraSpace)
Mariya Maistrovskaya (University of Toronto)

DSpace Annual Report 			11