4Science DSpace technical updates discussion: As always, the 4Science team is deeply involved in the DSpace development, bringing ideas and solutions to let DSpace evolve. Over the last months our team has focused its attention on two major areas of improvement.
UI Modularization with NX
The DSpace Product Visioning Group back in its final report dated 2021 but still very actual https://wiki.lyrasis.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=199525834 hightlighted the need to modularize the DSpace architecture and empower users as the two top priorities. More specifically, a better support for plugins and customizations was deemed necessary to accomplish the task.
The 4Science proposal
The proposal to modularize the DSpace frontend using Angular Nx goes exactly in this direction. The goal behind this proposal is to modularize Angular codebase into reusable libraries and enable external plugins to use core features independently. The proposal presented by our Giuseppe Digilio, Deputy Chief Technology and Innovation Officer and DSpace committer, at the DSpace developers meeting on 21st August https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/2025-08-21+DSpace+Developers+Meeting, summarizes the current Angular architecture and its limitations, introduces NX and the benefits that it can bring to DSpace. This architecture will facilitate the development of features for DSpace without the need to modify the core code, thus facilitating maintenance and reducing the costs of porting from one version to another, allowing users to easily keep their repository up to date.
Join the community discussion!
To learn more DSpace Angular : library-based architecture proposal – DSpace – LYRASIS Wiki
Possible Audit Trail Feature for DSpace
4Science DSpace technical updates discussion: Another major proposal from 4Science is about the introduction of an Audit Trail feature in DSpace. Having an audit trail mechanism is a critical feature in many use cases where data integrity and compliance must be guaranteed. Knowing Who, What, When have performed action in the repository help to build trust in the tools and streamline the administration tasks allowing a more decentralized management of the data without the risk to lose control.
An initial implementation of an Audit Trail feature is already available in DSpace-CRIS and it is the basis of what 4Science aims to donate back to core DSpace:
- AuditConsumer: https://github.com/4Science/DSpace/blob/dspace-cris-7/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/app/audit/AuditConsumer.java
- AuditService: https://github.com/4Science/DSpace/blob/dspace-cris-7/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/app/audit/AuditService.java
The goal
The goal is for DSpace to have an out-of-the-box way to track common changes to various objects: who made the change, when was the change made, and what was the change. The amount of details about the “what” is the current focus of the improvements that 4Science are implementing together with the backport of the solution from DSpace-CRIS to DSpace.
Ideally, DSpace should track these changes automatically (and likely internally) in a location where the audit trail can be easily reviewed/searched (especially for individual objects). This might mean the audit trail needs to be in a format accessible to the repository, such as in the database, in SOLR (as in the current DSpace-CRIS implementation) or another storage but linked to the object it relates to.Only users with Admin rights on the object should be able to see the audit trail of that object. The audit trail should be accessible from the object page at a minimum (so that you can see all changes to that object). But, a global audit search/browse option may need to also be implemented to find information about object deletion (as the object no longer exists in that scenario).