DuraSpace have announced that support for DSpace 6 will end on 1st July 2023 which gives us a year to complete the upgrades of our ten instances of DSpace. DSpace 7 is a major upgrade with an entirely new interface including updated submission processes and workflows. For each instance, existing customisations that have been made will either need to be re-written or retired.

New instances will need to be thoroughly tested and approved by their relevant stakeholders before a final migration and switchover of the live URL is scheduled. We will need the relevant stakeholders to commit time in their work plans for testing and will need to align our timeline for their instance with their availability.

DSpace Instances

University of Edinburgh

DataShare https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/

Edinburgh Research Archive https://era.ed.ac.uk/

Exam Papers Online https://exampapers.ed.ac.uk/

Digital Preservation https://digitalpreservation.is.ed.ac.uk/

Collections Manager https://collectionsmanager.is.ed.ac.uk/

SCURL Repository Partners

Aberdeen University Research Archive https://aura.abdn.ac.uk/

Heriot-Watt Research Output Service https://www.ros.hw.ac.uk/

Research Scotland Consortium https://research-scotland.ac.uk/

St Andrews Research Repository https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/

Queen Margaret University Repositories https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/

Upgrade Plan

For each instance:

• Set up a vanilla DSpace 7 test instance on a new virtual machine
• Apply styling to match required branding
• Migrate content from live server
• Look at each customization in turn
  • Is there new functionality that already covers this or does something similar in DSpace 7?
    • Do not want unnecessary customisations! - Some will just need to be re-done – e.g. theses submission screens for St Andrews
• Thorough testing, including integrations with existing services e.g. PURE
• Schedule switchover date
• Setup new live instance on a new virtual machine
• Bring in customisations and styling
• Migrate fresh snapshot of live data & upgrade database
• URL updated to direct to new instance