Ever since the introduction of the XML User Interface (Manakin) in 2008, DSpace ships with 2 user interface choices. To evaluate today's uptake of each user interface we identified a sample set of 274 repositories running DSpace 1.6.0 or newer.

Repositories running an older version of DSpace than 1.6.0, were excluded from the sample set for a number of reasons. DSpace 1.6.0 was released early 2010, meaning that repository managers running a pre-1.6 DSpace repository have not upgraded in over 2 years now. While they might still want to upgrade at some point in the future, great features added in these last two years haven't convinced this crowd so far. This gives reason to believe that new features in upcoming releases would not compel them to upgrade now. There may also be other reasons why they are not upgrading: key people might have left the project or even the institution. It is also impossible to automatically identify if these instances are still being actively used and managed today.

Results

53% or 144 repositories of the sample were using the JSP UI, and 47% or 130 repositories were using XML UI, on March 30th. In order to spot a trend we took a closer look at uptake per version.

Uptake by DSpace version

Our experiment showed no visible trend indicating a difference in user interface uptake depending on DSpace version. Although impossible to determine automatically, it would be interesting to have UI uptake figures exclusively for new installations.

Caveat: Consortial Implementations

Public repository lists such as OpenDOAR, ROAR and the Who's Using DSpace Registry were at the basis of this experiment. These indexes list individual institutions using DSpace repositories. In some cases, institutions rationalize their repository costs by operating them in a consortial model. These consortia can manage individual installations of DSpace or can host multi tenant installations meaning that several institutions actually use the same installation of DSpace. We chose to follow the public repository lists and observed that all of these consortial efforts are running JSP today.

The sample set used contained 74 entries for such JSP repositories, this represents 27% of the total of 274 repositories in the set.

@mire user interface support

In general @mire recommends the XML UI for modularity reasons, but @mire supports all institutions, whether they are using the JSP or XML User Interface. The majority of @mire's clients operate a DSpace with version 1.6 or newer, while a few clients still maintain older versions. From the 35 @mire client repositories included in the sample, 31 are using the XML User Interface. Our clients upgrade at their own pace, as they keep full ownership and control of their DSpace repositories.

@mire's recent contributions to the DSpace open source code include the Discovery faceted search & browsing, the Mirage theme and the Configurable Workflow Framework.