The Google Summer of Code

GSOC logo

 One of the major projects happening within the DSpace community at the moment is the Google Summer of Code; essentially Google sponsor a number of student developers to work on various open source projects over the summer. DSpace have five projects in the running.  

Two things we’ve been asked about many times have been the import of citation information from bibliographic reference managers such as EndNote and improved statistics.  Both are included within GSOC.  That means both import from and export to the most common citation software packages and a vastly improved stats package.  In the mean time we’re also looking  at rolling out Google Analytics but more of that later.

Another nifty tool looks to be the visualisation aspect for Manakin. Manakin is the new DSpace interface, replacing the old JSP layout with XML. It’s going to be a while before we’re ready to take on the full Manakin integration but the ability to add maps, graphs and timelines as a way of visualising the repository content sounds like a nice step in the right direction to improving some of the user functions. 

Lastly there are two projects looking at broadly preservational aspects: versioning and content integrity. Versioning support for items is another good tool that’s been lacking from the list so far and the content integrity checker will do just that – ensure that files within the system have not been altered and if they have, then when.

GSOC wraps at the end of August and it shouldn’t be too long before the code is made available and is implemented within OR.

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