As a certified Platinum Provider for DSpace, with the most contributions to the open-source DSpace code in 2024-2025, the Atmire team has been dedicated to improving DSpace, focusing on fixing bugs and enhancing performance in the latest 7.6.4, DSpace 8.2, DSpace 9.0 and DSpace 9.1 releases. Our goal is to ensure a smooth and reliable experience for institutions, and these updates bring significant improvements tailored to the needs of our users.
New User Features
The Health page now includes an “SEO” validation check.
A basic check of your DSpace site’s Search Engine Optimization is now available on your Health page (/health) in the Admin sidebar. This SEO report checks that your sitemap is visible, your robots.txt is visible and that you have SSR (Server Side Rendering) enabled. #10485
Accessibility Settings can be customized by users.
Basic accessibility settings like Notification (popup) timeouts and ARIA Live Region timeouts can now be customized by each user of your site via the “Accessibility Settings” link in the footer. This allows users more control over how long confirmation and error messages are displayed. #3613
The “Edit Item → Metadata” tab now supports a dropdown for “dspace.entity.type” field. In previous versions, this field was free-text, but now only valid Entity types can be selected. Metadata field code was also refactored on this page. See #3722
Bitstream Storage (assetstore) now supports Apache JClouds, supporting many cloud providers.
See Configuring JCloudstore for Asset Storage documentation and #9915
Bugfixes
Dependency updates
General user enhancements and fixes
- RSS/Atom feeds are now available for search results, allowing you to subscribe to a search via RSS. #2489
- Fixed search bug where stale data could sometimes be returned. #3888
- Fixed bug where access restricted thumbnails were not shown to users who have proper access rights. #4165
- Fixed statistics bug where “view” events could be sent twice when using scoped themes. #4099
- Fixed a REST API bug where sending a PATCH request for an unknown metadata field could clear all object metadata. (This only impacts REST API and not the UI.) #10961
Submission / Workflow enhancements and fixes
- Fixed infinite loading issue that could occur on submission forms. #4060
- Fixed bug where fields of type “name” in submission forms could not be deleted properly. #4073
- Fixed bug where importing a multi-paragraph abstract from PubMed would result in it being split into many abstracts in DSpace. #10559
- ArXiv importer began failing because its configuration didn’t use the HTTPS URL. #10997
Administrative enhancements and fixes
- Edit menus on all community, collection, item pages are now dropdowns. #3994
- Fixed bug where CSV import (Batch Metadata Import) was not compatible with Controlled Vocabularies. #9749
- Fixed bug where list of bitstreams on “Edit Item > Bitstreams” tab would be duplicated when using pagination. #4015
- Fixed issue where Handles were not stored for communities & collections when `VersionedHandleIdentifierProviderWithCanonicalHandles` provider was enabled. #10240
Performance/stability improvements
- Limited the number of Items that can be exported at once to 500. This limit is configurable on the backend via “bulkedit.export.max.items” #10030
- Fixed issue where login endpoints to the REST API didn’t always close their database connection after login action was completed. #10598
- Indexing improvements to the “index-discovery” script when your site has a larger number of relationships (between entities). #10351
- Fixed bug where the Geospatial Map JavaScript code was loaded even when it was not used. #4447
Accessibility improvements
- Improved screen reader accessibility for header and recent submissions. #4335
OpenAIRE
- OpenAIRE v4 compliance improvements to both the OpenAIRE submission forms and the OAI-PMH “oai_openaire” metadata format. #10128
Recognizing Atmire contributors and the DSpace community
We would like to recognize our Atmire team members for their significant contributions to the improvements and fixes in this release. Many of them even dedicate part of their free time to DSpace, which makes these advancements possible.
Our sincere thanks also go to the wider DSpace community for actively identifying and reporting issues. Your input and feedback play a key role in shaping these improvements. We truly appreciate your collaboration and ongoing support, and we look forward to continuing to make DSpace even better and more efficient for everyone.
If you’re considering setting up or upgrading a DSpace repository, we’d be happy to help.
Get in touch with us through our contact form.