DSpace at ILRI

Presentation to the KALRO Open Data and Open Science in Agriculture workshop in Nairobi, Kenya on June 18, 2015.

http://aims.fao.org/activity/blog/forum-open-data-and-open-science-agriculture-kenya

1. A semi-technical overview of “CGSpace” DSpace at ILRI Alan Orth Nairobi, Kenya - June 18, 2015 KAINET Open Data and Open Science Workshop
2. History of DSpace at ILRI • 2009: ILRI launches Mahider (“repository” in Amharic) • 2010: Other CGIAR centers and programs join our platform and share hard / soft costs • 2011: Rebranded as “CGSpace” • 2015: 9 CGIAR centers, ~50,000 items, ~250k hits/month
3. “CGSpace” in June, 2015
4. How we use DSpace • Content people embedded in each department help capture results (presentations, papers, brochures, etc) • Primary location for institutional outputs! • No posting PDFs on corporate website! • 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
5. • Communities, sub-communities, and collections • Tempting to model after organization hierarchy! • (we did) • … but organization hierarchies change! DSpace hierarchies
6. Mostly organized by output type now...
7. Metadata • Standard Dublin Core is available • No AGROVOC • You can create custom controlled vocabularies in arbitrary namespaces, eg: cg.subject.ilri
8. Custom metadata in ILRI report Not AGROVOC!
9. “Discovery” facets • Context-aware metadata summaries • Side effect: helps spot metadata inconsistencies! • … Open Access, Open access, open Access, etc.
10. Search engine optimization (SEO) Help Google Scholar consume your content! • XML sitemaps • Consistent domain name, eg: cgspace.cgiar.org • Persistent links for resources • Website speed and HTTPS both a plus • Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools to submit sitemap, control indexing, see stats, etc
11. Sitemap view in Google Webmaster Tools
12. Importance of persistent links • Website addresses change… • mahider.ilri.org -> cgspace.cgiar.org • But resources stay the same! http://hdl.handle.net/10568/67073 • “Handle” service from handle.net • Everything under prefix 10568 is CGSpace • Default DSpace handle prefix is 123456789!
13. dc.identifier.uri specifies an item’s persistent universal resource identifier (URI)
14. Getting data INTO DSpace • Day-to-day submission is manual, by a small army of editors • One-time batch uploads of items from other systems in CSV format (InMagic!) • OAI-PMH for metadata only • OAI-ORE for metadata + bitstreams (eg, from another DSpace or Sharepoint, etc) • SWORD (haven't tried) • REST API (DSpace 5+, haven't tried)
15. Getting data OUT OF DSpace • REST API for structured JSON or XML • OAI-PMH for metadata • OAI-ORE for metadata + bitstreams (PDFs, etc) • RSS feeds for websites / blogs • XML sitemaps for search engines* *Google discontinued the use of OAI for discovering site content in 2008! http: //googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. com/2008/04/retiring-support-for-oai-pmh-in.html
16. CCAFS website, driven by Drupal + DSpace APIs
17. “Latest outputs” on project blog populated via RSS, links to CGSpace
18. Open source workflow on GitHub https://github.com/ilri/DSpace
19. Skills needed in your organization Besides content people(!)... • Prioritize Linux systems administration experience (Tomcat, httpd, PostgreSQL, DNS, SSH, git) • General: computer science background • Web developers a diverse bunch... • Java development experience doesn't hurt
20. Extra considerations • Item mapping • Maintenance tasks (background batch jobs) • Backups of assetstore and PostgreSQL! • Altmetrics tracks social media mentions • Separate production / development environments • CGSpace server is $80/month • ~20GB of PDFs, ~8GB of Solr data
21. Getting help • “DSpace Tech” mailing list • “dspace” tag on StackOverflow website • a.orth@cgiar.org