Add built in feature to generate SAF files

[alexklbuckley]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The 'Batch import (ZIP)' feature in the DSpace admin interface requires the user to upload a zipped SAF (Simple Archive Format) file.

Currently there are 4 GitHub repos that people have made available offering solutions for generating the SAF files:

• https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/SAFBuilder
• https://github.com/jcreel/SAFCreator
• https://github.com/isido/saf-archiver
• https://github.com/lib-uoguelph-ca/dspace-csv-archive

These repos are not necessarily maintained, and some of them have not been updated in a long time, deeming them an unreliable and unsustainable solution.

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be nice if there was a built-in DSpace feature where either:

1. Users could upload their files and DSpace would generate the SAF file and import it.
2. Or the 'Batch import (zip)' feature was enhanced so that users did not have to upload SAF zipped files, but instead they could upload their csv (in Dublin Core schema format) and bitstream files and DSpace could import them.

Describe alternatives or workarounds you've considered

We have tried using the SAFBuilder repo, however, it continually errored out for us. As it notes it is not being actively maintained it is hard to know if these errors are due to updates to the codebase being required:

:~/SAFBuilder$ ./safbuilder.sh -c src/sample_data/AAA_batch-metadata.csv -z Recompiling SAFBuilder, just a moment... Detected input CSV as:UTF-8 Opened CSV File:src/sample_data/AAA_batch-metadata.csv Output directory is: /home/<name>/SAFBuilder/src/sample_data/SimpleArchiveFormat [ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.codehaus.mojo:exec-maven-plugin:3.5.0:java (default-cli) on project safbuilder: An exception occurred while executing the Java class. org/apache/commons/io/file/attribute/FileTimes: org.apache.commons.io.file.attribute.FileTimes -> [Help 1] [ERROR] [ERROR] To see the full stack trace of the errors, re-run Maven with the -e switch. [ERROR] Re-run Maven using the -X switch to enable full debug logging. [ERROR] [ERROR] For more information about the errors and possible solutions, please read the following articles: [ERROR] [Help 1] http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/MojoExecutionException

Additional information

Add any other information, related tickets or screenshots about the feature request here.

[tdonohue]

While I'm generally in favor of this idea, these tools have always been maintained separately from DSpace. Adopting one would require a developer to want to contribute their code back into DSpace and also help maintain it there. At this time, DSpace also can only accept tools written in Java or Angular, as our volunteer Committers group only has expertise in those areas.

From what I've seen the current "best" tool (in terms of most maintained) is https://github.com/jcreel/SAFCreator. However, I do not have experience with some of those other tools.

I can verify though that https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/SAFBuilder has been unmaintained since its core developer moved on to another job. See the note in the README about that: https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/SAFBuilder?tab=readme-ov-file#similar-projects-to-also-consider

This ticket needs a volunteer. Any tool given back to DSpace must be written in either Java or Angular.