The New Year had a great start for 4Science and we are happy that euroCRIS is giving us the chance to share some of the good news with this great Community.
During the last euroCRIS Strategic Membership Meeting in Athens, we presented our ideas about 5 new Add-ons for the open source platform DSpace-CRIS: CKAN Integration; Video/Audio Streaming; IIIF Image Viewer; Document Viewer; OCR & Transcription.
The first one we want to present you is the CKAN Integration add-on, which is already available in open source on GitHub: https://github.com/4Science/
The CKAN module allows the deposit of tabular data (CSV, XLS, etc.) in a CKAN instance directly from the DSpace-CRIS installation through an automatic curation task. Besides depositing data, it is also possible to access any CKAN services from DSpace-CRIS, such as the direct preview of dataset content without the need to download the full dataset, and the display of the dataset as grids, graphs and interactive maps. A demo is available to take a better look at some of the add-ons' functionalities.
We haven’t just worked on the technological aspects, but we also contributed to the open source communities we support.
As an example, last year ended with our participation in the Open Access Symposium 2016 week at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where the South African National Research Foundation hosted a successful DSpace-CRIS Workshop, in collaboration with the UCT and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology Libraries.
The 2-days workshop was facilitated by Andrea Bollini, our Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, considered the “father” of DSpace-CRIS by the DSpace Community and also a member in euroCRIS Task Groups "CERIF" and "CRIS Architectures".
The Workshop was a great opportunity to present the new functionalities of DSpace-CRIS and to engage in stimulating conversations with about 40 IT administrators, librarians and repository practitioners, from many important universities and research councils.
All the slides presented during the Workshop are available here: http://ir.nrf.ac.za/handle/
We truly believe in “openness” and we are committed to make everything we develop available to anyone as soon as possible. That is the reason we launched the “#makeITopen” campaign: with contributions from the community we aim at releasing in open source the other 4 add-ons we have already developed, as we did with the CKAN Integration module.