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DSpace has Two UIs:Should we converge?

Tim DonohueDSpace Tech Lead

tdonohue@duraspace.org

2015 DuraSpace Sponsor Summit

2015 DSpace UI Usage

• March 2015: crawled/searched for likely DSpace sites in..– DSpace.org registry– OpenDOAR.org registry– ROAR.eprints.org Registry– OpenArchives.org OAI-PMH Registry– U of Illinois OAI-PMH Registry– Google (searches “unique” to DSpace)

• Validated each site & deduplicatedScripts at: https://github.com/tdonohue/dspace-site-parser

Two UIs: Global Adoption

NOTE: While each site URL was unique, it’s possible multiple URLs could point to the same DSpace installation.

JSPUI Locations

Largest by country: Japan (127), USA (79), Brazil (60), Taiwan (58), India (55)

XMLUI Locations

Largest by country: USA (255), Turkey (58), Norway (45), Spain (44), Brazil (43)

JSPUI Version Distribution

~30% (300) of JSPUI users are “up-to-date” (3.x, 4.x, 5.x)

XMLUI Version Distribution

~60% (537) of XMLUI users are “up-to-date” (3.x, 4.x, 5.x)

JSPUI vs XMLUI

• JSPUI– Underlying codebase is 12.5 years old– Modern (Bootstrap) theme in 4.0

• XMLUI– Underlying codebase is 7 years old– UI based on a (nearly) obsolete platform

(Apache Cocoon)– Modern (Bootstrap) theme in 5.0

Two Platforms in One

• Committers rarely work on both UIs– Neither UI gets “full attention”

• Very little of UI codebase is “shared”

• Features come out in one UI first, get “ported” to the other later– UI feature lists are hard to track /

document

Two UIs: Committer Split

Where do we go from here?

• One UI or keep two UIs?

• What is of interest to you in a UI? (use cases / features / needs)

• What do we keep? What can we do better?

• What would your ideal UI look like?