[Dspace-general] Question one: What's working and what isn't?

[Dorothea Salo]

Answering my own question... We're currently running 1.4.1 in
production, and are testing and modding 1.5 for a rollout soon.

> This week's question (based on Q21 from the 2006 survey) is about
> DSpace's existing functionality. Please offer one to three existing
> DSpace features that you believe work well in your situation,

I'm very happy with Manakin theming (barring a few minor growls). As a
de-facto consortial repository, being able to theme communities and
have the theme cascade to subcommunities and collections is a major
win.

In the "little things make a big difference" category, the checksum
checker makes me happy. Accidentally losing or mangling data is a
nightmare; it would completely demolish the trust my user communities
have in the service, and my own trust in the software. That nightly
"all is well" email is a relief.

The HTML display engine pretty much Just Works. Some of the best and
most important work I've captured in both of the repositories I've run
have been websites. I'm very grateful for this feature.

 then
> offer one to three existing features that you believe need
> improvement. Feel free to explain your answers at length! Also, please
> let us know which version of DSpace you are running.

Repeating quietly to myself "no new features... no new features..."

The whole communities/collections model needs a rethink, I think.
Faculty I talk to find it confusing and unintuitive; they expect
communities to be able to contain items, and collections to be able to
contain other collections. (The latter is particularly important for
some kinds of scoped searching.) Perhaps following on from this, they
expect to be able to make changes to community information that only
an administrator can make, because there is no DSpace analogue to
"collection administrator" for communities. Finally, for our
consortial-repository purposes it's not good that only an
administrator can change collection/item access policies. I need to be
able to hand that work out to librarians at our member campuses, but
DSpace won't let me.

I understand that DSpace is meant to be an archival system, but the
model of "metadata and bitstreams can change before final deposit, but
not afterwards except by administrator fiat" doesn't accord with user
expectations where I am. People make metadata mistakes and don't
notice them until after approving the submission. People upload
bitstreams and want to swap them out for better bitstreams. Stuff
comes in through a variety of channels that needs editing after the
fact (authority control, anyone?). I spend a *lot* of time -- much too
much time! -- dealing with things like this, as well as talking down
irritated users who want to be able to fix these things without going
through me. I also end up editing metadata directly in the database
(yes, I know, bad bad me!) because one SQL query takes so much less
time than making the same change to forty-'leven items individually in
the UI.

The input-forms.xml system of modifying forms needs an overhaul as
well. One problem with it is that not all repo managers have server
access in order to modify this file, but they're a lot closer to the
content/metadata than the IT professionals who *do* have access to the
file. Another problem is some really bad interactions with the
hardcoded "big three" front-page questions -- if you put date.issued
in your input-forms.xml, but your depositor doesn't check the
"previously published" box, DSpace wags a stern finger and won't let
them proceed! (This is a serious problem for theses and dissertations,
which do have a date.issued but aren't colloquially considered
previously-published in many disciplines.) Finally, this file doesn't
have any conditional logic. It can't, for example, say "okay, if
dc.type is Working Paper, show these fields; otherwise, show those."
This makes it essentially impossible to simplify the forms in a
heterogeneous collection, which is an unhappy thing for usability.

Right, those are my three. Next?

Dorothea

-- 
Dorothea Salo dsalo at library.wisc.edu
Digital Repository Librarian AIM: mindsatuw
University of Wisconsin
Rm 218, Memorial Library
(608) 262-5493