Open access

Ithaca, NY DuraSpace, a leading provider of open source tools to help organizations ensure their digital content is durable and usable, announces the release of an updated version of DuraCloud Open Source (0.8) with improvements for managing content in the cloud.

From Alice Specht, ALC Council Chair, Dean of Libraries, Hardin-Simmons University

Abilene, Texas The West Texas Digital Archives, an online digital repository of significant historical materials belonging to the members of the Abilene Library Consortium (ALC), is now available online at http://wtda.alc.org/.  This virtual collection of more than 44,000 preserves and provides access to valuable historical resources previously unavailable to the general public.

From Tom Cramer, OR11 Program Chair

The Fedora committers are now in the final month of wrapping up Fedora 3.5, scheduled for release at the end of March 2011. This release focuses on several "under the hood" changes that improve the service's ability to be integrated and tested as part of larger repository systems and sets the stage for a full move to Spring-based pluggability and configuration. Several of the most popular issues will also be addressed in this release, including dropping the requirement to use DBXML if you elect to use FeSL for policy enforcement.

In our weekly developers meeting, the DSpace Committers decided to tentatively schedule the DSpace 1.7.1 (bug-fix only) release for March 25, 2011. Peter Dietz of Ohio State University Libraries will coordinate this minor release.

Ithaca, NY The Geek Feminism blog (http://geekfeminism.org/) supports, encourages, and discusses issues facing women in geek communities, broadly defined to include science and technology, gaming and more. Authors include women (and men) who are actively involved in software development or technically-related fields and have an interest in geeky discussions about feminism, feminist discussions about geekdom and/or geek feminist discussion about other things.

From Molly Kleinman, University of Michigan Library

Ann Arbor, Michigan I am pleased to announce the launch of Open Attribute, a suite of tools that make it simple to copy and paste the correct attribution for any Creative Commons licensed work on the web.

http://openattribute.com

From Jessica Jones Irons, Executive Director, National Humanities Alliance

Ithaca, NY  DuraSpace, a not-for-profit organization providing open source software and services, announced today that Michele Kimpton will assume the role of Chief Executive Officer, effective March 1, 2011.  Kimpton is currently the Chief Business Officer of DuraSpace, and formerly the Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation.