DSpace 9.3 upgrades
TDL will upgrade its hosted DSpace repositories from verion 8.4 to version 9.3 in summer 2026. See Order of Upgrades for more about your institution’s upgrade timing.
DSpace 9.3 comes with numerous bug fixes and performance improvements, which you can read about in the full release notes available in the Lyrasis wiki. Below are a few new features that TDL users may find useful. This release does not feature major changes to the DSpace user interface.
New features
Support for tracking usage statistics via Matomo (a Google Analytics alternative). DSpace can now integrate with Matomo Analytics, in order to track usage statistics, search statistics and downloads. This integration requires an existing Matomo account or instance. See screenshots at #10435 (Donated by 4Science with additional funding from University of Maryland ) - (optional)
Request a Copy now supports sending a secure download link for larger files. Files under a (configurable) size threshold are still attached in requests. But, larger files now send a secure (auto-expiring) link to allow the requester to download the file. See also #3984 (Built by The Library Code, funded by Technische Universität Berlin) - (optional - Request a Copy must be enabled)
Embargo release dates for embargoed files are now displayed on the Item page. The user interface includes a new "showAccessStatuses" configuration for bitstreams on the Item page. When enabled, all embargoed files will display a badge (on the Item page) which contains the date the embargo expires. Screenshots can be found in the comments of #3882 (Donated by Université Laval) - (optional)
Health page now includes an "SEO" validation check. A basic check of your DSpace site's Search Engine Optimization is now available on your Health page (/health) in the Admin sidebar. This SEO report checks that your sitemap is visible, your robots.txt is visible and that you have SSR (Server Side Rendering) enabled. #10485 (Donated by Atmire)
Accessibility Settings can be customized by users. Basic accessibility settings like Notification (popup) timeouts and ARIA Live Region timeouts can now be customized by each user of your site via the "Accessibility Settings" link in the footer. This allows users more control over how long confirmation and error messages are displayed. (Donated by Atmire)
Creative Commons license display now uses the backend configuration. The existing "cc.license.name" and "cc.license.url" configurations on the backend are now used by the frontend to determine which metadata field(s) to use for display of the CC license on the Item page. See #3165 (Donated by Abel Gomez)
CSV Export from Admin Report. The Administrator Reports (Beta feature) now supports CSV export. After running a report, next to the results is export button that allows you to export those results to a CSV. See #4071 (Donated by Université Laval)
Order of upgrades
| Repository | Institution | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | training-ir9 | TDL | 7/10/2026 | done |
2 | tdl-ir | TDL | week of Jul 13, 2026 | done |
3 | utsa-ir | UT San Antonio | week of Jul 20, 2026 |
|
4 | utswmed-ir | UT Southwestern Medical |
| |
5 | twu-ir | Texas Woman’s University | week of Jul 27, 2026 |
|
6 | utexas-ir | UT Austin |
| |
7 | udallas-ir | University of Dallas |
| |
8 | uhcl-ir | UH Clear Lake |
| |
9 | utmb-ir | UT Medical Branch |
| |
10 | uh-ir | University of Houston |
| |
11 | ttu-ir | Texas Tech | week of Aug 3, 2026 |
|
12 | baylor-ir | Baylor |
| |
13 | shsu-ir | Sam Houston State |
| |
14 | wtamu-ir | West Texas A&M |
| |
15 | txstate-ir | Texas State University |
| |
16 | tcc-ir | Tarrant County College |
| |
17 | uh-ir | University of Houston | week of Aug 10, 2026 |
|
18 | tamucc-ir | TAMU-Corpus Christi |
| |
19 | swco-ir | Texas Tech/Southwest Collection |
| |
20 | lu-ir | Lamar University |
| |
21 | unthsc-ir | UNT Health Science Center |
| |
22 | asu-ir
| Angelo State |
| |
23 | untlis-ir | UNT |
|
|
24 | twdl-ir | TDL |
|
|
Upgrade process
On the day of your scheduled upgrade, here is what you can expect:
You will receive an email via the TDL Helpdesk system notifying you that your upgrade will take place that day.
Around noon on that day, TDL will restrict sessions on your DSpace repository, meaning nobody will be able to log in and add or change content. There will be a brief (<5 minutes) downtime when this happens. After that, anonymous users will still be able to browse the site and download unrestricted files while the remainder of the upgrade takes place, but Administrators will not be able to log in or make changes.
Before and after the brief downtime, TDL will add a site-wide message to your DSpace advising users of the upgrade and that they will be logged out of their sessions at noon.
During the 5-minute downtime, any users who come to the site will be redirected to a message indicating that the repository is undergoing maintenance and will be up again in a few minutes.
Nick Woodward will migrate all of your content to a new DSpace 9.3 staging instance that includes theme and other customizations for your repository.
Once the migration is done, TDL will point your production URL to the new DSpace 9 site. For most repositories except very large ones, that process will be completed during the morning of the following day.
TDL will contact you and ask you to test login via Shibboleth and to test/review the new site.