The Road From DSpace 6 to DSpace 7 and Beyond: Building (and Building on) Two Modern Digital Repositories at Rice University

In October 2023, the Digital Scholarship Services team in Fondren Library at Rice University upgraded its digital repository. The process was both challenging, rewarding, and instructive for our future work on digital collections. We took a mixed approach in which 27% of our content was moved to Quartex, which could be curated as digital cultural heritage, 11% was retired, and the remainder migrated from the DSpace 6.4 system to the new 7.6 deployment. We are now using our two new platforms' API's to enable a microservices-based approach to customized UI presentations for special collections, and semi-automatic metadata enrichment, and document submission workflows.

This poster describes our preliminary attempts in this space on two collections: geo-located photographs of Chinese subway advertisements over two decades and the geographically dispersed papers relating to the United States' President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.