dspace-rest-client: A Python REST client library for DSpace 7

DSpace 7 runs on a fully-featured RESTful API. Development of client libraries in popular programming languages and frameworks is essential to integrate DSpace with other systems and offer flexible solutions to developers and administrators. The Library Code, with support from Universität Hohenheim, has begun work on such a client library for Python 3. This work is fully open source, published under the BSD 3-Clause License. An initial use case for this client library is to support Python scripts that can import migrate content to DSpace 7 repositories. This kind of programmatic approach allows a level of customisation (e.g. mapping, handling specific cases and objects, error handling and reporting) that other import methods do not offer. The latest release implements CRUD operations for core DSpace objects such as communities, collections, items, bundles, bitstreams, eperson users and groups. Work is planned to support search, resource policies (accession permissions), processes, and workflow management. Our goal is to fully implement the DSpace REST operations, and we look forward to sharing this work and welcoming collaboration from the wider DSpace development community. Published package: https://pypi.org/project/dspace-rest-client/ Source code: https://github.com/the-library-code/dspace-rest-python