[Dspace-general] Tombstones for withdrawn items -- how to add, customize?

[Tansley, Robert]

Hi Jim,

> In the DSpace documentation at
>    http://www.dspace.org/technology/system-docs/functional.html 
> I see the following:
> 
> "[Items] may be 'withdrawn', which means they remain in the 
> archive but 
> are completely hidden from view. In this case, if an end-user 
> attempts 
> to access the withdrawn item, they are presented with a 'tombstone,' 
> that indicates the item has been removed. For whatever 
> reason, an item 
> may also be 'expunged' if necessary, in which case all traces 
> of it are 
> removed from the archive."
> 
> I have a few questions about this very desirable feature:
> 
> 1) Items I've withdrawn do not appear to have tombstones. How 
> do we make 
> this happen as a matter of course?

What happens when you try to access the item page for one of the
withdrawn items?  (I did notice that if you directly try to access one
of the files in a withdrawn item, it just downloads as before, which is
a bug -- a report has been filed).

> 2) Can we present the administrator with a menu of tombstone 
> wordings? I 
> note that MIT has a number of good suggestions for this at
>   
>
http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/build/policies/community-collection.
html
> and we'd like to do something similar.

That's a good idea but would require some development work.  From my
point of view, the ideal situation would be that you get someone at
Michigan to make this change and contribute it back to the open source
code base; if this isn't an option, you could try asking on this list
and the dspace-tech list to see if anyone has similar needs and/or is
interested in doing the necessary development work (which would be
pretty small).

> 3) Can we place tombstones on items that are expunged?

Not with the current functionality.  The initial thinking (back in
2001/2002) was that 'expunge' should leave no (external) trace that the
object ever existed; a 'tombstone' would be evidence that the object
existed at some point.  To maintain a tombstone would mean maintaining
some information about the object in the repository (even if just the
identifier), but right now 'expunge' blows away *everything*.  So again,
some minor development work would be need to achieve an 'expunge but
leave tombstone' feature.

 Robert TANSLEY / HP Labs / MIT Visiting Researcher
 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Robert_Tansley/