DSpace 7 - The Power of Configurable Entities

DSpace 7 has been extended with "Configurable Entities" in response to a growing need for describing more types of objects and relations between objects as well as compound objects; examples include: authors, projects, datasets, grants, lecture series, ... . This talk will do a deeper dive into the new Configurable Entities feature, including how to configure your DSpace to support different object models and how users can create the relations between items. New concepts in DSpace 7 such as relations between items, virtual metadata, display options per object type, … will be introduced. Defining an object model through configuration in DSpace 7 is made possible without using specific hardcoded Java classes for the specific objects. To achieve this the concept starts from the current DSpace Item object and extends it, also allowing institutions to keep using DSpace out-of-the-box with its familiar object model. The entities in a custom object model are items that can be typed, and relations between items of different types can be created. Several different object models can be defined and can exist alongside one another in the same repository. Finally, this talk will briefly touch on the next steps for future versions of DSpace.