The DSpace Leadership Group, the DSpace Committers and LYRASIS are proud to announce that DSpace 7.0 Beta 2 is now available for download and testing.  

Beta 2 is the second scheduled Beta release provided for community feedback and to introduce the new features of the 7.0 platform. As a Beta release, we highly advise against running this version in production. Rather, we ask that you consider installing it in a test environment, try it out, and report back any issues or bugs you notice through the JIRA issue tracker.

DSpace 7.0 Beta 2 is deployed for public testing on a dedicated demo site and it can be installed manually or via a Docker “quick install”.  Instructions are available at: Try out DSpace 7.

Included in Beta 2

  • Administrative Search (video) combines retrieval of withdrawn items and private items, together with a series of quick action buttons.
  • EPeople, Groups and Roles can now be viewed, created and updated.
  • Bitstream Editing (video) has a drag-and-drop interface for re-ordering bitstreams and makes adding and editing bitstreams more intuitive.
  • Metadata Editing (video) introduces suggest-as-you-type for field name selection of new metadata. Shibboleth Authentication
  • Viewing Item Version History
  • Collection and Community (video) creation and edit pages.
  • English, Latvian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish language catalogs
  • Security and authorization improvements, including REST API support hiding specific metadata fields (metadata.hide property) and upgrades of different software packages on which DSpace 7 depends.

Source: DSpace 7 Release Notes

Coming soon

In the remainder of April, the contributors are focusing on a planning sprint to review the remaining release goals and (as necessary) adjust the 7.0 final release schedule.

  • Beta 3: Beta release focusing on Account Profiles, Submission/Workflow enhancements, additional Administrative tools
  • Beta 4: Beta release focusing on SEO enhancements, Theming enhancements, Batch processing tools, Solr-based Statistics views, improved GDPR alignment
  • Beta 5: Optional Beta release to cleanup any bugs or issues found in previous Betas, or complete any incomplete features.7.0 Final Release: The final, production-ready release of
  • 7.0 will be released as soon as all the above Betas have been completed and any outstanding major bugs have been resolved. Roughly estimated at 1-2 months after the last Beta.

More information and the latest changes can be found on DSpace 7 Release Goals.

Learn more

A number of recorded presentations and workshops are available through following links: 

Initial preparations and edits are being made to the official documentation for DSpace 7.

Thanks to major code contributors!

The following organizations have been major code contributors to DSpace 7.

  • Atmire
  • 4Science
  • FCT / RCAAP  

We gratefully recognize the following institutions, who together have generously contributed financially to support the DSpace 7 staged release program:

  • Cornell University
  • Duke University
  • Imperial College London
  • Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis
  • LYRASIS
  • National Library of Finland
  • The Ohio State University
  • Texas Digital Library
  • University of Arizona
  • University of Edinburgh
  • University of Kansas
  • University of Minnesota
  • University of Toronto