We are pleased to announce the release of DSpace 7.5! This release provides new features and many improvements and bug fixes for the 7.x series of releases.
The 7.5 release concentrates on porting older 6.x features into 7.x, resolving three Tier 2 priorities, two Tier 3 priorities and two Tier 4 priorities in our 7.x technical roadmap. As of 7.5, all 6.x features listed in Tiers 1-3 have now been ported to 7.x. Donated features and improvements are also included in this release.
New and improved features include:
- Subscribe to email updates from a Community or Collection, similar to 6.x (ported from the DSpace-CRIS project, partially donated by 4Science)
- Supervision orders allow Administrators to assign Group(s) to supervise other user's (in-progress) submissions, similar to 6.x JSPUI.
- System wide alerts which allow you to display a site-wide banner to announce scheduled downtime or maintenance, similar to 6.x XMLUI
- Ability to disable self-registration or restrict to specific email domains, similar to 6.x
- Search interface supports filtering by controlled vocabularies, similar to 6.x
- Support for custom Configurable Workflow steps, including "Select Single Reviewer Workflow" and "Score Review Workflow" from 6.x
- Ability to add Contextual Help Tooltips on any page, similar to 6.x JSPUI. Currently, only a basic example is provided, with more likely to be added in future DSpace releases.
- Basic MediaViewer now supports captioning for audio/video files. (Donated by yingjin) The caption file must be provided alongside the video/audio file.
- On Item pages, the "Edit Item > Metadata" tab has been redesigned to allow for easier reordering of metadata values, etc.
- On Item pages, metadata values can automatically link to "Browse By" results for that value. (Donated by The Library Code with the Support of German Institute for Urban Affairs)
- "Show identifiers" submission step allows you to optionally pre-register Handles or DOIs for all new submissions (Donated by The Library Code with support of Technische Universität Hamburg and Technische Informationsbibliothek)
- New DataCite plugin for importing metadata from DataCite when starting a new submission. (Donated by @johannastaudinger, @floriangantner and @philipprumpf)
- New "dspace database skip" command can be used to skip problematic database migrations during upgrade to 7.x. See this common migration error which has impacted some older DSpace sites during their upgrade to 7.x.
A partial list of other fixes include:
- Performance improvements to the User Interface, including new page caching options and a decrease in the size of the initially downloaded Javascript package.
- Performance improvements to “metadata-import” and “cleanup” commandline tools (latter was donated by Agustina Martinez)
- Fixes to Request a Copy’s helpdesk strategy (donated by Mark Wood, IUPUI)
- Number of bitstreams displayed on the Item page is now configurable (Donated by Arvo Consultores y Tecnología. S.L)
- "Back to Results" button appears on Item pages when browsing/searching and clicking on an Item.(Donated by Michael Spalti)
- Fixed breadcrumbs to display full object names on hover over (Donated by eScire)
- Fixed issue where homepage hits could trigger 2 views in Google Analytics
- Fixed issues with Syndication Feed buttons on Community/Collection pages (Donated by Nicholas Woodward)
- Fixed issue where "Browse By Title" didn't allow you to filter results by multiple words (Donated by Toni Prieto)
- Fixed issue where opening a restricted bitstream in a different window or tab did not work properly.
- Fixed issue where items with thousands of bitstreams caused the Item page to load extremely slowly or crash entirely.
- Fixed robots.txt to include fully qualified URLs in Sitemap
- Fixed issue where submission forms listed Collections in the Collection dropdown in a random order. They are now ordered by Title (Donated by Arvo Consultores y Tecnología. S.L)
- Fixed issues with Creative Commons jurisdiction and locale (Donated by Toni Prieto)
- Fixed issues with OAI Harvesting "last harvested" date. (Donated by Nicholas Woodword)
- Enhance ImageMagick generated PDF thumbnails.(Donated by Alan Orth)
- Accessibility bug fixes for several pages (Donated by eScire)
- Support for Node v18 in the User Interface
- Numerous other bug fixes and improvements. See the Release Notes for details.
New and improved Language support:
- Brazilian Portugese (Português do Brasil) language updates donated by Lucas Zinato Carraro (lucaszc)
- Catalan (Català) language added & donated by Toni Prieto
- French (Français) language updates donated by Pierre Lasou (pilasou)
- German (Deutsch) language updates donated by Sascha Szott (saschaszott)
- Greek (Ελληνικά) language updates donated by LisAtUP
- Kazakh (Қазақ) language updates donated by myrza1
- Polish (Polski) language added & donated by PCG Academia & Michał Dykas (michdyk)
- Spanish (Español) language updates donated by Toni Prieto & Cristian Emanuelle Guzmán Suárez (CrisGuzmanS)
- Ukrainian (Yкраї́нська) language added & donated by AndrukhivAndriy
A total of 44 individuals contributed to 7.5, with major institutional contributions coming from 4Science and Atmire.
Some features/improvements in the 7.5 release were supported by the DSpace Development Fund. We gratefully recognize the generous financial support of all institutions who have donated to this fund.
For a full list of changes and contributors in 7.5, see our Release Notes.
Would you like to contribute towards our next release (7.6)?
DSpace 7.6 will be released in June, 2023. While the scope of this release is still being finalized, we welcome contributions from anyone. Contributions may take the form of:
- Contributing money to our DSpace Development Fund - All funds go directly towards development in the next release, and you will be acknowledged on our DSpace Development Fund page.
- Contributing code to 7.6 - As a volunteer developer you can determine which issue ticket you’d like to work on. Please get in touch with Tim Donohue if you have any questions.
Thank you!