eResearch

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

Ithaca, NY To strengthen, engage and provide professional learning opportunities for repository user and developer communities, topics and issues of interest will be presented in an free, online web seminar series offered by DSpace Foundation, Fedora Commons and Sun Microsystems throughout 2009.
Additional information–dates, registration, and presenters–for All About Repositories Webinars will be available through DSpace, Fedora Commons and Sun web sites early in 2009.

By Dan Davis, Chief Software Architect, Fedora Commons I find strong desire to reflect at the end of the year on our first full year of operating as Fedora Commons. It has been a wild ride which should be expected for any startup. We had the long awaited delivery of the Fedora Repository 3.0 at mid-year followed by Fedora Repository 3.1. We also maintained our commitment to the community by delivering Fedora Repository 2.2.3 and 2.2.4. Along the way we have worked with 100+ projects to help them build their systems.

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.

By Thornton Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Outreach, Fedora Commons  In our ongoing efforts to organize communities around solution areas well suited to Fedora, we have begun working on multiple fronts to encourage what we have been calling “scholars’ repositories.” Dedicated to the idea that born-digital scholarly materials will need to be created in repository-enabled environments in order to be sustained, solutions in this area will need to foster creation, management and even dissemination of content in ways that are completely under the control its owner.

By Sally Rumsey, ORA Services & Development Manager, Oxford University Library Services  It is no understatement that populating institutional repositories for research materials is proving something of a challenge. Some disciplines have their own popular subject-targeted repositories such as ArXiV (http://arxiv.org/) or SSRN (Social Science Research Network) (http://www.ssrn.com/). Their attraction lies in the authors’ strong allegiance to their discipline.

London, UK The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), the Repositories Support Project (RSP), the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and JISC held a joint workshop on December 12, 2008 entitled, “Tackling the Preservation Challenge: Practical Steps for Repository Managers,” to engage repository managers and preservation experts in sharing perspectives, requirements, problems and solutions.

Visit Mulgara’s redesigned web site to download the latest version of the popular scalable RDF database written entirely in Java. The release of Mulgara version 2.0.7
may be downloaded at: http://mulgara.org/download.html

The JA-SIG Conference Planning Committee is pleased to announce the Spring 2009 Conference to be held March 1-4 in Dallas, Texas. The call for proposals for JA-SIG 2009 ”Higher Education Open Source Communities - Working Together” is now open.

Andreas Aschenbrenner, State and University Library, Goettingen; Tobias Blanke, King’s College London, Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC); David Flanders, Birkbeck Library, University of London; Mark Hedges, King’s College London, Centre of e-Research (CeRch), and; Ben O’Steen, Oxford Library, Oxford Research Archive (ORA) have presented ideas around how repositories might become a more integral part of the rapidly evolving Web landscape in the November/December issue of DLib Mag