Authority to Entities: A DSpace 7 migration case study

DSpace 7 introduced the concept of entities and relationships which provide a way for the repository to represent many concepts in open access publishing. One of the most obvious use cases of this new framework is a way of representing the relationships between people (authors, editors, project managers) and works like publications and projects. If you are migrating from a previous version of DSpace, you might already have authority control in place.In 2023, The Library Code GmbH completed a large migration of a DSpace 6 institutional research repository to DSpace 7. A large part of this work involved the conversion of nearly 40,000 authority-controlled metadata values to entities and relationships, where institutional authors would now be represented by a Person entity with relationships to Publication and Project entities. This presentation will have a technical view on entities, relationships and data migration. We will share our experience using entities and relationships in DSpace 7. We will discuss the technical approach taken, its benefits and challenges and share the lessons learned during this project. We hope to help demystify one of DSpace's largest new features by presenting how we achieved this large migration.