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

[Sarah L. Shreeves]

We're running DSpace 1.4.2 (heavily customized) and are in the process 
of upgrading to 1.5 - we expect to do that later this fall.

Things that work well:

 - I appreciate the metadata template for collections. We do a fair 
number of serial type things that have very common metadata, so it's 
useful to be able to have those pre-filled out fields. I'd love to be 
able to reuse these templates from one collection to another but that 
would be a bonus.

- I agree with Dorothea that the checksum checker and the html display 
engine work well and make me and (in the case of the html display 
engine) my end users happy.

- I am pretty happy with how Manakin alongside the customizable 
submission process will simplify the upload processes for our users and 
will allow us to tailor some communities for specific user groups.

Areas that need further development:

- I'd agree with Dorothea that the community / collection structure and 
administration could be re-thought. We've actually customized our 
instance and have added community administration functionality which  
has turned out to be so crucial for us. It's allowed me to get 
departmental libraries and colleges involved in IDEALS at a level that I 
don't think would have been possible otherwise. For example, our 
Agriculture library completely takes care of the Agriculture community - 
adds sub-communities and collections as needed, adds additional 
administrators, etc - which has been a great way to distribute the work 
of running IDEALS. We're in talks with our Grad College now about ETD's 
which will absolutely require community level administration. This is a 
very important development area.

- Statistics and Reports - I know that there are a couple of stats 
packages out there (and we're using one currently) but none seem to be 
very satisfactory - or haven't been upgraded to work with Manakin. This 
is one of the primary selling points of IDEALS for many - and what we 
have in place is pretty basic. We really have to get stats and reports 
integrated into the core DSpace code.

- Better ways for both repo managers and collection administrators to 
edit metadata both individually and in bulk. I don't have direct access 
to the database - and honestly wouldn't know how to change things there 
if I did (I'd have to reach back pretty far in my memory) - so I either 
have to ask Tim D. to do updates or I have to do things item by item. 
The same is true of my collection administrators. The item by item 
update process for metadata is painful (I never send my collection 
administrators there if I can avoid it) - this could certainly be 
improved. I also think that a bulk update would be an extremely useful 
development - from the user interface!

These are brief thoughts but I wanted to get them out there.

Sarah

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Sarah L. Shreeves
Coordinator, IDEALS
http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
sshreeve at illinois.edu
217-333-4648 or 217-244-3877