Record Page Media Player in DSpace 7

Abstract

In recent years, public collections and academic research communities have shown a growing interest in open-source repository solutions that are easy to install, customize, and operate. DSpace, a repository software developed by the not-for-profit DuraSpace organization since 2002, and its current version 7 proves to be an adequate solution to these requirements regarding storing and repositing digital objects. However, DSpace 7 is currently available only in a beta version and lacks certain features and functionalities, the development of which – due to the urgency of the momentary needs that our team intended to meet – could not wait until their planned implementation by the DuraSpace community. A media viewer and media player were such missing functionalities. Therefore, the authors of this article and their colleagues (web designer Annamária Tápai-Kovács and software developer Dániel Sipos) have undertaken to develop these functionalities and offer the resultant blocks of code to DuraSpace to be implemented in the code base of DSpace 7. In this paper we shall discuss the brief history of our collaboration with DuraSpace and share code snippets from our development.