The Road To CGSpace

Alan Orth and Abenet Yabowork

IITA/AfricaRice CGSpace TrainingIbadan, Nigeria, 19 October 2015

What is DSpace?

• Open-source software for creating digital repositories

• Driven by demands to have all outputs and products available and accessible

• Stewarded by DuraSpace with input from the user and developer communities

• Not a “library” management system

CGIAR Science

Council in 2008:

Research

benefits must

travel across

borders

Access to Public Goods, Long on CGIAR Agenda

https://r4dconsult.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/international-public-goods-research/

CGIAR Circa 2008

Our research outputs and results were in bad shape!

• Addresses were not permanent• Not on the internet (or digital!)• Not captured• Kept inside intranets

DSpace Helps Make Information “F.A.I.R”

Free: no subscriptions, passwords, or “paywalls”Accessible: is publicly available (long term)Indexed: can be found in search enginesReusable: has a permissive license

Addresses both the moral and legal imperatives… aka the “carrot” and the “stick”.

History of DSpace at ILRI

Before: InMagic, physical library2009: ILRI launches Mahider (“repository” in

Amharic)2010: Other CGIAR research centers and programs

join our platform and share hard / soft costs2011: Rebranded as “CGSpace”2015: 8 CGIAR centers, 5 CRPs, other projects,

~50,000 items, ~200k hits/month

“Mahider” in December, 2010

“CGSpace” in October, 2015

What’s coming soon in CGSpace...

• Primary location for institutional outputs! (No posting PDFs on corporate website!)• Content people embedded in each department

help capture results (presentations, papers, brochures, etc)

• Integrate with website and blogs via RSS feeds (Direct ALL traffic to DSpace!)• For data sets, videos, etc we make a metadata-

only accession with a link to eg YouTube

How ILRI Uses “Mahider”

What is “CGSpace”?

• “Multi-tenant” use of a DSpace application• Shared admin, look and feel, publishing,

content management, hosting, training and support

• Enhances access to—and use of—knowledge (~30,000 open access materials currently)

• Indexes and preserves outputs by giving persistent identifiers

• Allows searching across centers, CRPs, projects, etc

open access + open standards + open licenses =

enhanced visibility of research outputs

Publications, journal articles, books, training materials, project reports, factsheets, links to digital audios, videos, presentations and posters

Hosted content Content ‘out’

Harvested content

CGSpace as “Publishing”

Cent

res,

CRP

s, p

roje

cts

CGSpace communities

Example of how we use it at ILRI (“Mahider”)

Mahider: Home Page

Browse by

programs

and projectsNarrow

search

using

Discover

Subscribe

Find content

Mahider: Home Page

Browse by

department

Browse by

type of doc

More Discover and Browse by options

Reports

Adm

ins

Recent items

Page views and

downloads for

the past 6

month

Mahider: Home Page, Stats

Mahider: Home Page, Stats

From ILRI

community,

collections, by

region and time

Mahider: Home Page, Stats

From ILRI

community,

collections,

by region and time

Mahider: Home Page, Stats

Filter results by

community,

collections,

and time

Mahider : Item display

List of items

Subscribe to only

the specific

collection (ILRI

publications)

Example: ILRI Publications

Mahider Item display

Bibliographic

info

Full text of

item

Specific Item View

stats

Item: Statistics

Mahider : Publishes to web sites

Mahider outputs

from RSS

Mahider: Publishes to Websites

Mahider : Publishes to intranet

Mahider outputs from RSS

Mahider: Publishes to Intranet

Mahider: Publishes to Twitter

Mahider outputs from RSS

Mahider: Publishes to Blogs

Mahider

outputs

from RSS

Mahider

outputs

from RSS

Mahider: Publishes to Email

Search

result

Search, browse, subscribe

Search

result

Outputs harvestedResearch

results

Video/audio

Presentation Publications

Journals

Outputs re-published

User

Running “CGSpace”

• We are “cost” and “expertise” sharing• Requires “more than basic” expertise to exploit in terms of

admin, customization, interface, content architecture• All code changes deposited in GitHub (where main DSpace

code development now is)• Staff time—Linux admin, information systems and content

specialists• Dedicated production and development servers• Active Yammer network• Annual CGSpace partners meeting

Ongoing Work

• Migration of legacy content by centers• Align CGSpace metadata to draft “CG core”• Upgrade to version 5 (testing in the past two

weeks) brings many new features, like ORCID, Linked Open Data, etc

• DSpace to WordPress• DSpace to Drupal• AGROVOC plugin• Harvest from other DSpace instances

This presentation has a Creative Commons licence. You are free to re-use or distribute this work for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to ILRI.

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