Has anyone tried merging two DSpace instances?

[Mark H. Wood]

We have a repository of somewhat specialized materials, that we'd now
like to fold into another repo.

The easy part is that this specialized repo. consists of a single
Collection. (It runs a version of Manakin modified by the good folks
at TAMU to make the Community layer essentially invisible.)

The interesting part is that we're taking this collection from a
DSpace 1.8.1 instance to a 6.2 instance.

The scary part is that I'm unsure what will happen with the Handles.
I presume that they will transfer as-is, since the two repo.s have
distinct prefixes. New materials in the moved collection will get
Handles with the new instance's prefix, and existing materials will
have the old prefix. We should be able to have the handle.net folks
re-home the old prefix to the new instance's local Handle resolver,
and in the meantime I think we can run both resolvers against the new
instance's database to avoid a resolution outage, yes?

I figure that I can just 'bin/dspace export' / 'bin/dspace import --add'
the single Collection to copy the materials over.

What am I overlooking?

--
Mark H. Wood
Lead Technology Analyst

University Library
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
755 W. Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-0749
www.ulib.iupui.edu