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

[Fatih Güneş]

Dear Cynthia,

What is the total number of items in your repository? The best way we used to move items between collections is csv import. But that needs to be done in chunks for the best performance.

In your example one collection items can go to more than one. So I hope the missing info of department exists in metadata of the items. Is it so? If so, some sql scripts can be prepared to generate csv lists for the movements of items.

Fatih Güneş 

[Bravismore Mumanyi]

We did this by creating a parallel structure for the new, then using SQL scripts for the actual move and then re-indexing the whole repo - these were just update statements per item. The handle numbers remains the same.

However, you need to take cares of external harvesters. Some will treat the moved as new items - creating duplicates in the end. So you may test with a single collection and check how harvesters like oclc (if applicable) handle the sync post collection move.

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[Mrs. Melba K. Sitwala]

Well done Mr. Mumanyi

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-community/CAAEWFHTCe-7azmaMYbHF7VYOLtApr7VmZ8P8_K6o%3DHhZQ%2BR-vQ%40mail.gmail.com.

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Mrs. Melba K. Sitwala University Librarian Library Main Campus (Dorado Park)

+264 81 451 6252 | +264 61 433 6000  m.si...@ium.edu.na  Dorado Park Ext 1, 21-31 Hercules Street, Windhoek, Namibia www.ium.edu.na

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