DSpace/Fedora

Mountain View, CA Got a repository? Would you like to understand more about what repositories are and how they operate? This spring DSpace Foundation, Fedora Commons, Sun Microsystems and SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) will offer a free About Repositories Webinar Series to provide professional learning opportunities for repository managers, developers, curators and decision makers. The seminar series will kick off on Feb. 18 at 9:00 a.m.

Ithaca, NY During the last four months of 2008 Fedora Commons has seen rapid growth in community efforts towards developing partnerships, software and dynamic new initiatives. The December 18, 2008 issue of Fedora Commons HatCheck newsletter reflects those activities in news, achievements, opinion, reports, and upcoming event information gathered from the community. You may view the newsletter online here:
http://www.fedora-commons.org/resources/newsletter.php

By Sandy Payette, Executive Director, Fedora Commons  As Executive Director, I thought it would be appropriate for me to reflect on the major accomplishments of the year in Fedora Commons and provide a mini “annual report” for the community. Indeed, it has been a very exciting time since the startup of our non-profit organization. With a fabulous core team, and a great set of partners and community participants, I am proud to report to the whole community my view of some of the notable developments this year.

Baltimore, MD Is there anyone out there who has an in-box, spam filter, hard drive, or update feed that is not brimming with outdated, digital junk? And are you even sure about whether it’s junk or not? Like old string, your institution may have a particular reason for keeping a collection of regularly updated data. It might even be an important reason. Welcome to the world of the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) fall meeting.

London, England The next FedoraEU meeting will be held in conjunction with the DeveloperHappinessDays in London Feb 9-13, 2009. The Fedora meeting will take place on Friday the 13th of February (for good luck!). Please save the date, more information will be avaialable soon. If you are interested in “Developer Happiness Days” dev8D please RSVP soon: http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/

Atlanta, GA Repositories are being deployed in a variety of environments (education, research, science, cultural heritage) and contexts (national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). Regardless of setting, context or scale, repositories are increasingly expected to operate across administrative and disciplinary boundaries and to interact with distributed computational services and social communities.

Ithaca, NY, Cambridge, MA The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a planning grant to the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons in support of their work to ensure durability and long-term access of scholarly research output and digital collections. This comes after the two largest providers of open source software for digital repositories announced their intentions to form a working collaboration in July of this year.

London, UK Dates are being finalized for Developer Happiness Days, a Fedora-related event that will be held in London in mid-February 2009–mark your calendars now!

Ithaca, NY Fedora 3.1 is a minor feature release that includes several bug fixes. Most notably, when using Mulgara, SPARQL is now supported via the repository’s RISearch interface, and the repository’s memory footprint has improved significantly. Read Fedora 3.1 release notes here.

Ithaca, NY You are invited to join your colleagues from the DSpace, Fedora Commons, JA-SIG, Kuali, and Sakai communities–community open source software by higher education, for higher education–for a reception on October 29th, 2008, 6:15pm - 8pm in Room W307AB of the Orlando Convention Center in Orlando, FL. This is an opportunity to talk with colleagues from schools that may be considering joining these communities and to learn more about the projects themselves.