RELEASE: DSpace 7.0 Beta 2

22/04/2020

Discover the improvements, part of the most recent step forward to a feature-complete DSpace 7.

Lyrasis, Atmire and other contributing institutions are comitting effort at high levels in 2020. This second Beta release delivers features in less than 2 months after Beta 1. Beta 2 in particular, is heavy on improvements for Repository administrators.

Editing metadata and bitstreams

A drag-and-drop interface for re-ordering bitstreams makes adding and editing bitstreams more intuitive. Among other improvements, suggest-as-you type has been introduced on the Metadata Editing page, as a way to make adding new metadata fields more efficient.

Creating collections and communities

Especially for repositories with a large hierarchy, the process to edit and create communities and collections has become more efficient, with lookups that offer fast access to the right collection or community. Updating the logo on a collection or a community now also supports drag and drop.

Unified access to private and withdrawn items

The new administrative search page becomes the one stop where an administrator can easily access private and withdrawn items, and immediately act on them with new action buttons.

Additional features

  • EPeople, Groups and Roles can now be viewed, created and updated.
  • Shibboleth Authentication
  • Viewing Item Version History
  • English, Latvian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish language catalogs
  • Security and authorization improvements, including REST API support hiding specific metadata fields (metadata.hide property) and upgrades of different software packages on which DSpace 7 depends.

Source: DSpace 7 Release Notes

Your DSpace 7 upgrade?

Even though 7.0 is still a few months away, you can start preparing today.

Make sure you have a good and up to date overview of those areas of DSpace where you have altered the default configuration, or where you have added customization to the code. For each area of customization, make the assessment whether it's necessary to be ported to your DSpace 7 repository. Either you still need it, or it could be dropped from the upgrade scope, either because it is no longer necessary, or because it has been replaced by a good default DSpace 7 feature. This can happen when new DSpace 7 features address the use case for which you originally added the customization to an older version of DSpace.

Upgrades are included in DSpace Express and Open Repository

If you are a current or aspiring client of Atmire's hosted DSpace Express or Open Repository services, know that the upgrade to DSpace 7 is part of your annual subscription fees. Our team is already working on the initial preparations to ensure that existing clients can get upgraded, and that new clients for the service will be able to start easily with DSpace 7.

Contact us today to learn more about DSpace Express and Open Repository