An international celebration of open access (OA) is taking place this week. This is the fourth post in a series of daily posts about open access.
The Libraries are excited to announce that we have a major upgrade coming for our institutional repository, Texas ScholarWorks (TSW). The software running TSW is called DSpace. DSpace is one of the most widely adopted open source repository platforms. Within the next 2-3 weeks, we’ll be migrating from DSpace version 6.4 to DSpace version 7.6. It may not seem like a significant jump, but DSpace 7 is the largest release in the history of DSpace, and has a completely different front and back end from DSpace 6.
Here are some improvements you can expect to see in DSpace 7:
- A totally new user interface based on Angular
- A refactored and enhanced REST API that should make integrations with other systems easier
- Redesigned submissions and workflows
- Drag and drop uploading
- Logging in to TSW from an item record (or any other page in TSW) will keep you on that page, rather than kicking you back to the repository homepage.
- Enhanced web accessibility
- Option to change the interface language
- More options for repository and community administrators
- IIIF support – this will make viewing images much more useful to users
We are in the process of developing customized documentation for TSW and we’ll make that available after the upgrade is complete. If you just can’t wait, you can get a sneak peek on documentation on the Texas Digital Library website (Texas Digital Library hosts TSW for us). We will also be scheduling a few virtual training sessions so that regular TSW users can learn how to use the improved TSW.
We are really looking forward to this upgrade, and we hope our regular users agree it’s an improvement.
