October 26, 2018 The New DASHA system migration leads to a more efficient, effective and innovative open-access repositoryDigital Access to Harvard (DASH), Harvard’s open-access institutional repository, was established within the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) in 2009. The repository provides free and open access to Harvard research, supporting faculty-driven open-access policies across the University. DASH is a DSpace application and is maintained by
Library Technology Services (LTS), in collaboration with the OSC.
The existing repository core had never been upgraded since its inception. Increased maintenance activity and technical debt, paired with proprietary workflow tools and customizations, made it unreliable, inefficient, and susceptible to error. In the fall of 2017, Atmire, a DSpace service provider, was contracted to design, build, and migrate a new Harvard DSpace instance. The development plan, spanning from November 2017 to July 2018 detailed 23 work packages to upgrade and enhance the functionality and stability of the existing repository. This new version of DSpace (version 6) provides a more robust operation, lessens the maintenance demands on Harvard Library Technical
Services, improves the workflow for both library staff and depositors, and expands and strengthens repository metrics.
The new DASH will continue to provide open access to nearly 50 thousand works (and growing) of Harvard scholarship: journal articles, dissertations, books and book chapters, conference proceedings, reports, and working papers. The upgraded user interface will make it easier for the millions of users from around the world who download works from the repository and mine its metadata each year by providing further granularity in browsing and searching, a more informative preview page, and a continued emphasis on quality metadata. For Harvard authors who deposit their work to DASH, an improved set of submission tools result in DASH receiving a richer set of metadata upon deposit, making processing much easier.
There were two innovative aspects to this project. The first was new code to accommodate ORCID’s revised API (version 2) within Dspace applications. ORCID, or Original Researcher or Contributer ID, is a free and open service that provides persistent digital identifiers - ORCIDs are valuable to include in a repository as they authenticate authors and link to author-managed profiles and bibliographies. While we utilized ORCIDs in our first instance of DASH, this upgrade ensures we can continue this practice and explore other uses for ORCID in the DASH repository (persistent logins, for example).
The second was a collaboration between Atmire and the OSC. In 2017, the OSC introduced a new initiative to distribute the deposit and committal workflows in DASH. The Distributed DASH Deposit program, or D3, maintains three cohorts of helpers: depositors, catalogers, and licensers. In partnership with the OSC, these cohorts seek out and deposit works to DASH, enrich metadata, determine the license under which a work is distributed, and troubleshoot records within the workflow. In our previous DASH instance, a number of secondary systems and hacks were utilized to manage the complex traffic related to D3. The new DASH workflow isolates records within the workflow for each
particular group, with tags that help direct a record to a particular cohort to resolve or move forward. This allows each cohort to see only the records and issues particular to them, eliminating the complexity and inefficiencies of the previous workflow. These workflow modifications, as well as the new ORCID API code, will be contributed back to the Dspace community by Atmire.
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