[Dspace-general] DSpace customisation

[MacKenzie Smith]

Hi Scott,

The DSpace Federation project you asked about is still underway,
but we've learned quite a bit on the subject since last fall. First of all,
the DSpace software itself has not been extensively modified by
other universities adopting it so far. Most of them have modified the
UI to make it reflect their own institutional culture, and some have
modified the submission process, added full-text indexing, etc.
Three of the institutions we're working with are considering adding
Shibboleth support over the default X.509 (certificates) or
logon/password access control. The main area of technical
development seems to be in modules that will be outside of DSpace
itself, e.g. publishing tools or rendering applications for
non-Web-native formats.

The major effort at most institutions to implement DSpace as
an institutional repository seems not to be in the technology
at all, but rather in the definition of policies and business models
that the library (or other part of the organization) needs to provide
a production service to its researchers.

As for avoiding upgrade problems if you make modifications,
we try to keep the development process as open as possible
(documenting future releases, as well as the code contribution
process). The best way to ensure future compatibility is to
communicate with us about the changes you're making, and
offer them back to the main codebase when you're done!

Hope this helps,

MacKenzie/

At 09:11 AM 9/22/2003 +1000, Scott Yeadon wrote:
>Hi,
>
>We're looking at introducing DSpace to ANU (Australian National University),
>and I have just read a paper date Jan 2003 in D-Lib magazine entitled DSpace
>- An OpenSource Dynamic Digital Repository, located at
>http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/smith/01smith.html. The section entitled
>"The DSpace Federation" contains a paragraph as follows:
>
>"In 2002, MIT formed collaborative partnerships with a small number of other
>academic research institutions in the US, UK, and Canada, to address some
>specific questions such as: what will it take to successfully deploy the
>system at another institution? How much localization, how much customization,
>and how much time and effort are needed?"
>
>I was wondering what sort of feedback (if any) had been received on these
>topics, especially where non-trivial modifications werer required such as
>more complex authorisation and low-level code modifications were required,
>and how these we done to avoid issues when upgrading to future versions.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Scott.
>
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MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-208
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu