SUNScholar/Operational Guide
BACK TO DSPACE CUSTOMISATION
BACK TO OPERATIONAL CAPACITY BUILDING
Contents
Introduction
This wiki page attempts to present some advice about the operational management of a research archive using DSpace software.
Common DSpace Operational Considerations
- Webometrics
- Harvesters
- Metadata
- Copyright and Open Access
- Collection Templates
- Community Management
- Custom Workflows
- Moving Items
- Mapping Items
- Item and Collection Permissions
- Harvest Remote Collections (OAI Consumer)
- User Management
Community/Collection Hierarchy
In DSpace there are two "containers", namely communities and collections. Communities are containers for collections. Collections are containers for items.
Items are individual submissions of research outputs such as articles, book chapters, data sets etc.. and each item has a unique digital object identifier (DOI).
What type of hierarchy is best?
This depends on the purpose of the archive, is it general or specifically subject based?
General
At Stellenbosch University library we have a general research based archive, therefore we decided to use the existing institutional organisational structure as the basis for our hierarchy.
- Faculties are designated as the top level communities.
- Departments are collections contained by the top level faculty communities.
- Research that does not fit easily into either of the above, is stored in a top level "University Collections" community. There are normally research groups that collaborate across several disciplines. Beneath top level "University Collections" community we created collections for these cross-discipline research groups.
- In addition, under the top level "University Collections" community we created a "Work-In-Progress" (WIP) community. Beneath this community we created collections for items that are pending review and then movement or mapping to other collections. For example submission and review of our student thesis and dissertations are a collection under our top level "University Collections" community.
- "University Collections"
- "Work-In-Progress"
Subject
To do.
The wisdom of experience
In the beginning the hierarchy seemed adequate, then issues started to appear.
Harvesters
The main issue was and still is, are the harvesters from other web sites. Some harvesters are "smart" and can create harvesting filters using the metadata available and others are "dumb", they simply want to a harvest a single collection. Unfortunately we have to cater to the dumbest harvesters, so a possible project for us is to create "main" collections for the following under the "University Collections: top level community:
- Student masters and doctorates
- Researcher publications
The collections above should satisfy the needs of the "dumb" harvesters who expect everything to be in one location. This naturally very negatively impacts the easy browse facility in DSpace, so the idea is to map items from the "main" collections to suitable destination collections. This could be an automated process if there was confidence in the standardisation and quality of the metadata per item. Unfortunately this is not always the case, so we are going to have to have more "eyeballs" to assist with mapping items and doing metadata quality control.
Lower the barrier for item submissions (Easy to submit!)
Our well constructed and detail collections hierarchy is great for the librarians to source items quickly BUT it is nightmare for users to navigate when using the DSpace submission system.
In addition the researchers expect the library to manage and organise items in the reposiotry as it is basically information management and the researchers quite rightly expect the library to perform these functions on their behalf and not have to be burdened with long tedious electronic forms during submissions that have many metadata fields to complete.
