[Dspace-general] [Dspace-tech] Edit History of records

[Larry Stone]

> Is it possible to view somehow, the edit history of record(s) in a =
> collection in Dspace 1.4?
>
> As a dbms we are using Postgres 8.1.11

It depends what you want to know: if you mean, database changes, at the
RDBMS level, there is probably some detailed logging you can turn on
in Postgres; check the manual (I don't know Postgres that well).  It doesn't
do that kind of logging by default.

If you meant, at the DSpace level, well, there's the old History system.
It was intended to record changes to the data model as "events" encoded
in RDF.  Unfortunately, the records don't include much detail about what
changed, and they are difficult to connect with actual DSpace objects.
For example, the URIs that look like Handles are _not_ Handles; the suffix
is really the database ID of the object, e.g. the "item_id" value for an Item.
Some of the details in the records do not have enough data to correlate
with the events.  It writes files in the "history" subdirectory of the DSpace
runtime directory, just look for the newest files.

For some possibly-inaccurate description, see the "History Recorder" section
in the file  docs/business.html  in the DSpace source distribution.

However, the History system got dropped in release 1.5 because nobody seems
to use it, and most of the data it recorded was meaningless.    1.5 includes
a general-purpose event system you can use to record your own history,
however.

So, what exactly do you want to know about edit history?  For what kinds
of DSpace objects?

    -- Larry