Curtin University trades Digitool for DSpace

Curtin University is Western Australia’s largest and most culturally diverse university with Australia’s third largest international student population.

The migration of Curtin University's espace repository to a customized version of DSpace 5 brought a ton of new features to the repository's users. Among others, users of the new repository now have:

• better search and browse functions,
• suggestions of related items to users at an item level; enabling serendipity discovery and increased exposure of espace items,
• the ability to filter search results by access status; making it easier to locate open access items,
• usage statistics available at site, collection, and item level,
• an overview of most popular items and authors, and location-based statistics are now available.

Redirecting existing links to Digitool

To ensure that links to Digitool content persisted, Atmire built a component that can resolve publications based on the identifier they previously had in the digitool system. This enabled Curtin IT to easily redirect users from the old domain to the corresponding item page on the new DSpace.

Mobile-friendly responsive theme

Atmire also designed a new responsive theme for the repository based on the university's own house style. Furthermore, the design was optimized for mobile use to improve the user experience of visitors using smartphones and tablets.

On top if these benefits, a mobile-friendly design also improves the repository's Google's Page Rank on mobile devices.

Project team

On the Atmire side, the project team consisted of Wouter Janssens as project manager and Tom Desair as tech lead. Our code ninjas on the project were Jonas Van Goolen, Antoine Snyers, Lotte Hofstede and Yana De Pauw.

In a next phase, the repository will be integrated with Curtin's research management system, Symplectic Elements.

If you would like to know more about migrating your legacy repository to DSpace, get in touch with our team!