News

Ithaca, NY Paul Gearon, DuraSpace Technical Lead and Developer, has announced the release of Mulgara 2.1.3. Mulgara can be downloaded from: http://mulgara.org/download.html.
Some of the major changes in this release:

Washington, D.C. Code{4}lib (http://www.code4lib.org/) fosters community and shares information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future. The Maryland and Washington, D.C. area code{4}lib group is hosting a joint meeting (http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/MDC) with the DC Fedora Users Group on Aug. 5, 2009 from 9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. at the National Agricultural Library.

by Thornton Staples, Director of Community Outreach and Alliances, DuraSpace Now that DSpace and Fedora have combined forces, we are beginning to bring together our community outreach activities to take advantage of both of our efforts. Chris Wilper and Brad McClean are working together on the developer community side of things, and Valerie Hollister and I are working on the user community.

By Chris Wilper, Technical Lead and Developer, DuraSpace Fedora Commons hosted a very successful Developer Open House at OR09 earlier this summer. Thanks to all who attended and participated. Through this formal session and in on-the-fly hallway discussions we got some great ideas on how to improve developer participation. As the developer-community around Fedora and DuraSpace continues to grow and evolve, it makes even more sense to create communications channels that enable broad involvement.

A recent study by Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, and Travis Brooks, “Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics: How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories” argues that physicists are well-served by depositing their papers in ArXiv early and often. ArXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University. This analysis of key points made by Gentil-Beccot et al is from Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton:

College Station, Texas 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.  The many repository platforms available today are changing the nature of scholarly communication.

New York, London Tens of millions of dollars, pounds and euros are invested each year by government agencies and private foundations to develop and support digital resources in the not-for–profit sector.

Washington, DC, Ithaca, NY, Boston, MA How long is long enough for our collective national digital heritage to be available and accessible? The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and DuraSpace have announced that they will launch a one-year pilot program to test the use of cloud technologies to enable perpetual access to digital content. The pilot will focus on a new cloud-based service, DuraCloud, developed and hosted by the DuraSpace organization.

Camden, NJ Ron Janz, Steward for the Preservation and Archiving Solution Community, and data librarian for Rutgers Libraries, has added “Preservation and Archiving Sites” to their Wiki as examples of repositories that have policies in place that define and articulate criteria or indicators of trustworthiness and reliability for digital repositories.

Rutgers, NJ The Rutgers University Libraries are pleased to announce the availability of OpenMIC, a METS-based bibliographic utility for describing and managing resources. OpenMIC is the open source release of the Rutgers University Libraries’ RUCore repository bibliographic utility and will be maintained on the RUcore annual release schedule. Releases will include fixes for known problems and recommendations for enhancements received from internal projects and the user community at large.