DSpace 8.x - Item Access Conditions, Discoverable

[Carolyn Sullivan]

Hello,

I have a few questions about the option to make an item not discoverable via the submission form, ie:

(1) Are items that are not marked discoverable still accessible for download and harvesting via OAI-PMH?  

(2) Will these items still get aggregated, indexed, or searched by external entities like Google Scholar? (if yes, then 'only available via a direct link' may be misleading, if the user anticipates access can only be gained via a direct link shared by herself or a DSpace Admin... as opposed to a direct link shared by an metadata harvester that DOES allow search/browse!)

(3) Does anyone know quickly offhand where this feature can be turned on/off?  (Otherwise, I'm off to rummage through submission form code)

(4) Was this an option via the submission form in 7.x, or did it just appear in 8.x?

Thanks,

Carolyn.

[Carolyn Sullivan]

Our developer Mo found the answer to (3), thank goodness!: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/spaces/DSDOC8x/pages/315720700/Submission+User+Interface#SubmissionUserInterface-Modifyingaccessconditions(embargo%2Cetc.)presentedforItems

[DSpace Technical Support]

Hi Carolyn,

(1) No, non-discoverable items should not appear in OAI-PMH results except through the GetRecord verb (see Item State Definitions). 

(2) While the intent is to make the items non-searchable due to not being on any browse or harvester output directly from DSpace, "Non-discoverable items are not guaranteed to be hidden from search engines" (Make an item non-discoverable). On a related note, some earlier versions of DSpace 7.x-9.x had a bug where the "noindex" tag was not being added to non-discoverable item pages, but that was fixed on 8.3 (see https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/4835). 

(4) Looks like item access conditions was added to the submission form in 7.2! See Release Notes. 

Best,

-Lia

On Tuesday, May 26, 2026 at 12:07:13 PM UTC-4 Carolyn Sullivan wrote: