Off-late we have been keeping busy with a slew of customization that we found to be quite important in the sense that these customizations were kind of becoming a necessity for a modern age Institutional Repository.

These customizations include:

1.    OAI-PMH Feature
2.    Electronic Thesis and Dissertation
3.    Document Viewer
4.    Web 2.0 Features such as Facebook / Twitter Integration, Rating, Recommendation
5.    Thesaurus
6.    Auto-Suggest
7.    Add Comments

1.    OAI-PMH: Open Archives Initiatives – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is a unique feature of DSpace. Although DSpace supports OAI, configuration is required in Dspace in order to use the feature.  

OAI-PMH basically provides your DSpace instance to harvest the metadata of other Digital Repository which also follow the OAI – PMH protocol. This allows the user of your repository to search through the repository of another digital library without having to browse through their digital repository.

2.    Electronic Thesis and Dissertation – Universities with a vast collection of Thesis and Dissertations usually suffers from issues such as managing the collection and providing the collection to a faculty or a student when required.

ETD removes the efforts and provides a simple mechanism where a student of a university can submit their thesis using the DSpace platform. DSpace has been customized to incorporate additional metadata items such as Supervisor Field, References, Subjects etc. which makes it easier for users to make use of the ETD.

3.    Document Viewer: DSpace team at Webinito have successfully integrated Google API as well as SCRIBD API which can help users to view their documents without having to download them, making it independent for them to download a software to view the item.

Webinito is also working on creating its own Document Viewer module that would have the feature to integrate with dspace without having to use any external API or share the documents on a third party server.

4.    Web 2.0 Features – As more and more people feel the need to share / bookmark or tag their item, we implemented common Web 2.0 features in order to promote sharing of items among community members. These features includes Rating of an Item, Recommending an item or Sharing an item on Facebook or Twitter.

5.    Thesaurus – Webinito has also created the Thesaurus feature which will help users to search through related terms making its search an intelligent one. This feature would also suggest users with terms while entering Keywords for a document.

6.    Auto-Suggest – Based on the different types of metadata entered, this feature would provide suggestions to the users when they searching for a particular term.

7.    Add Comments – This feature was available for Dspace 1.1 and hence DSpace team at webinito developed this feature for the stable version of DSpace 1.5.x

As part of our community development effort, we are going to release the code of Recommendation as well as Commenting feature both of are developed but they are available for older versions of DSpace i.e. 1.1.x