Guidance Request: Migrating Items from DSpace 6.3 to DSpace 9 Community Structure

[Cynthia Cynthi]

Dear DSpace Community

I hope you are doing well.

I am  seeking advice regarding the reorganisation of content in our DSpace 9 repository following a successful migration from DSpace 6.3.

In our previous DSpace 6.3 repository, our content was organised at the faculty level, as shown below:

Faculty
 ├── Theses and Dissertations
 ├── Research Articles
 └── Conference Papers

For example:

Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences
 ├── Theses and Dissertations
 ├── Research Articles
 └── Conference Papers

After migrating to DSpace 9, we redesigned our repository structure to better reflect our institutional organisation. Our hierarchy now includes departments under each faculty:

Faculty
 ├── Department A
 │    ├── Theses and Dissertations
 │    ├── Research Articles
 │    └── Conference Papers
 ├── Department B
 │    ├── Theses and Dissertations
 │    ├── Research Articles
 │    └── Conference Papers
 └── Department C
      ├── Theses and Dissertations
      ├── Research Articles
      └── Conference Papers

The migration was completed successfully, and all items are now in DSpace 9. However, the migrated items remain in the original faculty-level collections. Our objective is to move these existing items into the appropriate departmental collections under each faculty.

We would appreciate guidance on the following:

• What is the recommended or best-practice approach for moving large numbers of items from one collection to another within DSpace 9?
• Has anyone undertaken a similar restructuring after migration?
• Is it possible to batch move or map items to their respective departmental collections using existing metadata (such as department, affiliation, or another metadata field)?
• Are there any scripts, REST API methods, command-line tools, or other utilities that you would recommend for this process?
• Are there any considerations regarding metadata, handles, relationships, indexing, or item ownership that we should be aware of before proceeding?

We are looking for an efficient solution, as manually mapping and moving thousands of items would be very time-consuming.

Any recommendations, documentation, or examples from your own experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for your assistance.

Kind regards

Cynthia Mpofu
Librarian: Institutional Repositories & Digital Scholarship