DS7.x: Suppress or replace abstract for embargoed items

[darryl....@usask.ca]

We are looking to suppress the abstract for items with an embargo, or perhaps replace the abstract with some sort of "This item is under an embargo" message.  99.9% of the time this will be for theses deposited into DSpace via SWORD, wo they will have a value set for the embargo.field.lift field.  This is how we've handled it for our current DSpace 6.x instance  -- by modifying crosswalks and the item display and using the presence of that field as an indicator of when to replace the abstract.

I've (successfully) experimented a bit with similar changes to the Angular frontend, but it seems the better place to tackle this in DSpace 7.x would be in the backend, in the API code somewhere, so that the abstract isn't exposed via the API at all.

Has anyone tackled something like this before?  Any hints on where in the backend I might begin?  I assume I'd be looking to modify code in the dspace-api module?  Perhaps during some stage where the browse/search/individual record is assembled and converted to JSON for return?

Thanks!

- Darryl

[Tim Donohue]

Hi Darryl,

As of 7.2, we now support Item-level embargoes, which allows you to simply hide all embargoed Items. https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/Release+Notes#ReleaseNotes-7.2ReleaseNotes

This may be along the lines of what you are looking for, however it hides the entire item from search/browse instead of specific metadata fields.  At this time, we don't have any way to support hiding/replacing specific fields when an embargo is in place.  So, your embargo options are to either embargo the entire Item (hiding all metadata & files), or embargo individual files (access restricting just the files, but displaying all metadata).

Unfortunately, I don't have any recommendations on how to change this behavior in DSpace at this time, simply because DSpace currently doesn't really support access restrictions on individual metadata fields.

Tim