With the LTS release (v9) and the latest release (v10), InvenioRDM has reached the maturity needed for production-ready digital repository websites. InvenioRDM is a generic data management repository, developed by our team in collaboration with many partners all over the world. Free to use and open-source.
As first milestone, we have created and deployed the new instance of CDS and also migrated a selected set of records, metadata-only. This initial setup will allow us to iterate with the process of data migration, expanding incrementally the number of records and improving the data quality.
In the first quarter of this year, we will continue working on the InvenioRDM product, adding more features and integrating them in the new CDS website.
We will also start an analysis of the feature-set available in the current CDS, but still missing in the new platform: thanks to this, we will be able to come up with a plan for the next steps.
We are very excited to finally see the new CDS taking shape! Stay tuned for future announcements!
These first 6 months of the year 2022 have been quite busy. The CDS team focused on the development of InvenioRDM, the future research data management digital repository platform that will be the core of the future CDS version.
At the same time, production services need to be taken care of. While performing maintenance operations, we also worked on bug fixes and some technical features.
Future CDS platform – cds.cern.ch
With a small break of the development activities, we took half a day to discuss and define how we will kick off the new CDS platform: we came up with what we think will be a good strategy, and we hope to have the first dev/test instance by the end of the year, including a small subset of data migrated from the current CDS to the new one.
Even if it will be a long journey, we are very excited to get started!
InvenioRDM v9 and 9.1
The team contributed to the development of the latest 2 releases: InvenioRDM v9.0 and v9.1. These new releases enable curators to create their own communities of documents, to better self-organize content and make it easier for users to submit and find content. Each community is clearly identified, thanks to the new header with the name and the logo.
The way new documents are added to a community is managed via requests: when submitting a new document to a community, a new request is created where the submitted and the community’s curator can have a conversation with commenting. The request can be approved or rejected.
CDS Videos just got faster – videos.cern.ch
We have implemented a new feature in CDS Videos: the post-processing of uploaded videos got 2x faster! This is particularly visible when large video files are uploaded: the first two tasks, the extraction of the metadata, embedded in the video file, and the extraction of the video’s thumbnails now take half of the time.
Maintenance…
Databases for all the services have been upgraded to the latest versions, to ensure safety and security. The transcoding software, used in CDS Videos, have also been upgraded by our colleagues from the Webcast team, so that we can take advantage of the latest fixes and features.
On the 5th of July 2022, CDS suffered some slowness due to a very high amount of traffic, requesting some photos embedded in the CERN Home website. While being slower than normal conditions, the CDS website managed to serve more than a million requests, with a pick of 800 requests/second (thanks to connection queues).
While we are happy to see that our platform was up and running in such unusual conditions, we have identified some improvements, and we are working to change our infrastructure to be more performant when serving files.
What’s next
During summer, many absences are foreseen. The team will continue working on InvenioRDM v10: its features are critical to the future version of CDS. We are also planning to upgrade the web lectures player for an improved user experience when watching recorded talks, seminar or events.
What’s happening on CDS until the end of the year?
Currently (summer 2021), the team is working on consolidating the recently released CERN Library Catalogue platform with bug fixes and some new features, such as bulk extensions for loans, improving e-mails and ad-hoc features for the daily operation of the CERN Library.
The CDS Videos platform is very much used at CERN during the past and current extended teleworking period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It requires improvements and fixes. The team will be busy improving the upload experience of new videos to be much more smooth and fixing bugs.
At the same time, we will start a new analysis phase to identify the best approach to migrate the current CDS website to a new modern, user-friendly web platform based on InvenioRDM in collaboration with the CERN experiments. We will share more information on how the future platform will look like, stay tuned!
The CDS team has worked very hard to build the new Library Catalogue website and it is now live (released on April 2021). The website has been built in close collaboration with the CERN Library team but also with RERO, a competence and service centre for libraries in Switzerland.
The website contains all books, e-books, journals and standards available at CERN and allows CERN users to loan physical copies or access digital versions of such literature. The content that was previously available in CDS has been migrated to the new platform.
The new CERN Library Catalogue website is an Integrated Library System (ILS) software: while building the solution for CERN, the CDS team has created a reusable, open source, generic platform InvenioILS that can be used by other organization in the world, based on the open source digital repositories framework Invenio.
