Vireo 2.0.1 Released

The latest version of Vireo has been released just ahead of the 2013 TxETDA/USETDA Region 3 Joint Conference. The conference kicks off tomorrow morning at the Texas A&M University campus. This release is a bug fix release and doesn’t really bring any new features other than improved ProQuest compatibility. Originally when Vireo 2.0 was released the export capabilities were not vetted by ProQuest. In the intervening time we have worked back and forth with the folks at ProQuest to make sure that the export format meets ProQuests requirements. Read more →

Exporting from Vireo into DSpace

The first version of the Vireo Electronic Thesis and Submission system was built as an addon to DSpace. It used the same technology stack, reused the underlying database and file storage, operated within the same UI. The original idea was that Vireo would deeptly integrate with the repository. Because of these decisions there was no separation between how Vireo stored it’s metadata and it’s Dublin Core encoding of the metadata. Read more →

Vireo 2.0 Released

The latest major version of the turnkey solution for Electronic Thesis & Dissertation (ETD) management has been released. Vireo 2.0 brings many major new features to the system which will be a wide interest to many in the community. This release follows on 9 months of continuous development from Texas A&M University Libraries with wide participation from other organizations such as the Texas Digital Library and the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign. Read more →

Configuring Vireo 2.0

Vireo is a turnkey solution for Electronic Thesis & Dissertation (ETD) management from the initial point of a student’s submission, through the approval workflow, and to publication. This post gives an detailed list of all the configuration options that are available for system administrators to configure the application. While one of our goals of the Vireo refresh is to move as much configuration into the user interface as possible. This allows the thesis office staff to tweak and experiment with the various options without going through an system administrator. Read more →

Customizing Vireo Export Formats

Vireo is a turnkey solution for Electronic Thesis & Dissertation (ETD) management from the initial point of a student’s submission, through the approval workflow, and to publication. This post gives an overview of how to export with data from Vireo into other systems. The export system, introduced with Vireo 1.8, is a powerful and flexible mechanism for allowing other systems to use data from Vireo. The number of built-in formats supported by Vireo is greatly expanded, while also allowing for customizations at each institution. Read more →

Introducing Piper

Piper is an internal project we have been working on at Texas A&M University Libraries. The project is just in its initial stages at this point with the first kernel of an idea. I expect to that we will expand its capabilities in the future. Piper is basically a repository batch import tool right now, and in the future it could grow into becoming an internal repository workflow tool. Read more →

Merging Two DSpace Solr-Based Data Sets Together

Have you ever messed up a DSpace upgrade and somehow ended up resetting your DSpace statistics? I did that. When we upgrade DSpace at A&M we preform a fresh install each time and then restore the data from the old instance into the new instance. This involves connecting the database, linking the asset store, and copying the DSpace log directory. We like to do it this way so that our configs are fresh each time. Read more →

Find All Restricted Items Within DSpace

Here is an SQL query you can copy-and-paste into DSpace to find all items which have restricted access or contain bundles / bitstreams which are restricted. Restricted means that the object does not have an authorization policy enabling anonymous read. It’s actually quite hard to find the absence of something with SQL. After trying various methods the way I came up with to solve this problem is a sub select that counts how many anonymous access policies exist for each object and if there are none then report those. Read more →

Mixed XML and Property Files?

Have you ever wanted the simplicity of a plain old Java properties file but with just a little bit of grouping provided by XML? I’ve been working on a small side-project recently and it requires a simple configuration file of a dozen items or so. The project needed a repeatable set of configuration parameters, so that it could connect to several SVN servers. Each connection needed a URL, username, password, and a few other ancillary properties. Read more →

Buying an Expiring Domain Name

I recently bought a domain name after it expired and learned a lot about the process. I had been watching the name for many years, periodically doing a whois lookups on it to check it status. Early last November I did a lookup on it and noticed that it passed it’s expiration date back in October, I thought awesome I might get a chance to grab it! I started researching the domain expiration process so that I would not make any mistakes. Read more →