Fedora Commons

Ithaca, NY If you take the DEV8D symbol “8D” and turn it 90 degrees counter-clockwise you get a laughing face, which is suitable for an unconference structured around a program especially designed to make developers happy. How do the organizers know this phenomena is real? At the 2009 event attendees collaborated on the development of a “Happyness-o-meter” to find out exactly how happy the event made attendees.

Ithaca, NY Subject repositories house and make accessible a large quantity of specialized information and research that drives innovation in all areas of human endeavor around the world. What are the differences between subject repositories focused on a particular discipline and institutional repositories that house assets from multiple subject areas?

Madison, WI The long-term goal of migrating their digital collection, currently in production at University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, to an all-Fedora enabled repository system, mapped onto production workflows with many moving parts and pieces inspired the development of prototype site. Fedora’s scalability was tested by ingesting about 30,000 digital objects from representative collections:
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UWDCNew/

Madrid, Spain The Fifth International Conference on Open Repositories with the theme “The Grand Integration Challenge” will be held in Madrid July 6-9, 2010. Organizers have announced that the online proposal submission process is now open through March 1, 2010.

Boston, MA While ALA Midwinter Conference organizers geared up for their semi-annual meeting at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center,  the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) members and guests held a one-day symposium (http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/upcoming/ala/living.cfm) sponsored by Sun Microsystems to dig into pressing issues facing libraries as they seek to leverage digital access strategies and vast stores of information to sus

Ithaca, NY Greg Grossmeir knows his way around open content. As a Community Assistant for Creative Commons he is a liaison with the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) community (http://www.flossworld.org/index.php), and enables software developers to learn about and implement Creative Commons metadata support in FLOSS applications. On January 13 he offered a free webinar, “Enabing Open Scholarship” as part of the All About Repositories series sponsored by DuraSpace, Sun and SPARC.

From Thorsten Reimer
London, UK Arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/) is hub for research and teaching in the digital arts and humanities developed by the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King’s College London (KCL). Projects include the following new initiatives:

Ithaca, NY The DuraSpace organization is looking for an entry level java developer to join the team designing, building, and supporting its new cloud compute service and open technology named DuraCloud. DuraSpace is a 501(c)3 whose mission is to enable and support open source technologies and services for scholarship and research. DuraSpace currently supports several open source platforms including DSpace and Fedora.

The Netherlands The University of Twente uses Fedora in a project called ESCAPE (Enhanced Scientific Communication by Aggregated Publications Environments) which provides a “semantic overlay” allowing researchers to relate objects such as papers, topics, discussions, public media articles, and more.