Dear Friends,
The DuraSpace Member Summit was held April 10-11 prior to the CNI Spring Member Meeting in San Diego. Slides will be made available.
I was so pleased to report that DuraSpace had its “Best. Year. Ever.“ in 2017. The facts, figures, and narrative underscore the fact that DuraSpace is a sound investment in the scholarly ecosystem just in time for the launch of our 2018 Membership Campaign. Thank you to members who have already taken the time to renew their memberships.
This year we added two panel presentations focused on current topics of general community interest offered by community presenters.
On Tuesday, Liz Krznarich of ORCiD and John Kunze of the California Digital Library, participated in a panel discussion, “How do persistent identifiers intersect with digital curation, preservation, and discovery activities?” to present their view of why identifiers are important, how they can integrate with other digital workflow components, and how they can be improved.
Wednesday’s panel discussion, “The Future Will Be Open?” looked into the future of scholarly communication. Panelists discussed what it would take to move our distributed system of global scholarly communication to a place where it is both significantly more open and significantly more sustainable. Moderated by Michael Roy, Dean of the Library, Middlebury College, our panel of leading thinkers and practitioners dug into these questions which boiled down to, "Will the future be ours and affordable?" Panelists included Tyler Walters, Dean of University Libraries, Virginia Tech; Virginia Tech, John Willinsky, The Public Knowledge Project at Stanford Graduate School of Education and the Simon Fraser University Library, Stanford University; Martha Hruska, AUL Collection Services, University of California San Diego; and me. Learn more about this presentation and the panelists here.
Both panels were well received and sparked lively audience discussion. Our thanks to all our panelists! Look for future DuraSpace Summits to continue the trend towards being outward-facing and inclusive.
Please join us for the first of three members-only Hot Topics webinars that begin on May 17. The series is entitled, "The Revolution Will Be Open?.” The first webinar, “The 2.5% Commitment: Investing in Open,” will focus on David Lewis’s proposal for a 2.5% investment in open infrastructure and how this commitment makes visible and widely accessible the investments academic libraries make in open infrastructure and content. It will also review actions that have taken place in the past nine months to advance these ideas. Register here.
Project reports from DSpace, Fedora, and VIVO were concise and honest with regard to both successes, challenges and forward-thinking solutions.
CASRAI UPDATE
As you may have seen in our recent blog post CASRAI is now a DuraSpace project. We are very excited to bring the Research Management Information (RMI) dimension to our work and to add open standards and open systems to our mandate focus. The CASRAI mission is to change the way management information is collected and communicated in the research community and to strengthen the stewardship role played by universities in this objective. In the coming year CASRAI will continue to strengthen its established national chapters in Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as advance its newest chapter in Europe. For the mission to be accomplished we need the active engagement and support from as many universities as possible around the world; advancing real and lasting change will require strength in numbers from those most affected. If your institution is based in Canada, UK or Europe and you have a role to play in reducing administrative burden on your researchers and improving information quality for your administrative processes please contact us about how you can help. We are also hoping in the coming year to start a new CASRAI chapter in the US - if you are in the US and would like to explore this opportunity to lead there please contact me <debra> or David Baker <
CASRAI has a number of annual events taking place in our various chapters in Canada, UK and Europe in the coming months. We hope you will see an event near you with a programm that catches your interest: http://duraspace.org/news/attend-upcoming-casrai-community-events-canada-uk-and-europe
DSPACE
Anticipation around the emerging DSpace 7 code base is high, as Kristi Park, Director of the Texas Digital Libray, explained. Community interest in COAR work around aligning repository infrastructure. Ms. Park reported that In an effort to engage additional support institutions (and their developers) with new strategies designed to ramp up development on DSpace 7, the first DSpace 7 Virtual Community Sprint will be held May 7-18, 2018. More information here.
Enhancements to the DSpace Data Model with New Entities are being considered by the DSpace Steering Group and the Entities Working Group and whether to include this as part of the DSpace 7 efforts to better align the DSpace roadmap with the COAR Next Generation Repositories recommendations. This improvement would meet OpenAIRE v4 guidelines and make DSpace a more competitive option compared to proprietary solutions (like Bepress). Expanding the DSpace data model would support new object types (aka entities) such as Authors.
FEDORA
Stefano Cossu, Director of Application Services at The Art Institute of Chicago, gave the Fedora update. The Fedora Project is focused on several key initiatives while investigating ways to work together as a community more effectively and take advantage of opportunities to establish greater interoperability. As a community-supported open source project successful interoperation strategies rely on engaging committers as a fundamental part of creating a team dedicated to interoperation. The Fedora community is Increasingly focused on developing strategies to facilitate collaboration with projects, organizations and initiatives worldwide that includes designating funding for cross-technical work, and especially for collaboration external to DuraSpace and its members. Funding to address efficient cross technical work will enable flexibility in assigning people to projects/tasks.
VIVO
VIVO is very different from repository installations in that a major part of the institution has to get behind a VIVO installation so there is very long "on ramp" to a launch. Product Director Mike Conlon asked, "is there another OS community that has similar challenges?" It is notable that those institutions with VIVOs are all DuraSpace members in support of VIVO, and are often active community members.
Some high level aspirational DuraSpace goals include interoperability-breaking down project silos, diversity, inclusiveness, long-range economic stability, business development, internationalization and others. In many cases we share these goals with our member institutions. DuraSpace's pursuit of aspirational goals on behalf of the member community will include communications transparency and clear opportunities for wide participation.
Durapace Board Member and Stanford Libraries AUL Tom Cramer summarized Summit presentations by encouraging members to think of support and participation withDuraSpace from a broader perspective. "We are at an inflection point—our conversations are very different from what they were several years ago. We have made a lot of progress. Successes snd structures are reasons to celebrate.
We are nodes in a much wider network where expertise and knowledge are sharable in a wider sphere. DuraSpace has never had a better network—whole is greater than the sum of its parts and interconnectedness is valued. He concluded by urging attendees to think about how each individual's work relates to the wider community.
With many thanks for your support and participation.
Warm regards,
Debra Hanken Kurtz
CEO
2018 Membership Campaign
We offiicially launched our 2018-19 Membership Campaign earlier this month. Most of our current members should have received renewal notices last week and invoices will be sent out shortly. If it is at all possible for your institution to increase your financial commitment this year, please contact Valorie Hollister <vhollister@duraspace.org>. Learn more about DuraSpace in the 2017-2018 Strategic Summary (link).
SERVICES
DuraCloud Selected as a Featured Open Source Project for Mozilla Global Sprint
DuraSpace is excited to announce that its project, Open Sourcing DuraCloud: Beyond the License has been selected as a featured project for the Mozilla Foundation Global Sprint to be held May 10th - 11th, 2018. The Global Sprint is a collaborative event meant to “hack and build projects for a healthy internet.” The Sprint will allow people from many backgrounds -- students, journalists, librarians, educators, and anyone else interested in supporting the open internet -- to come together for two days and work to improve open projects that make the internet better, safer and healthier. See our blog post to learn more and sign up to participate.
ArchivesDirect, DSpaceDirect, and DuraCloud services from DuraSpace are built on solid open source software platforms and require very little effort to start up. DuraSpace staff experts work directly with service customers to provide personalized on-boarding processes and superb customer support. Our services can provide open access to institutional resources, preservation of treasured collections, and simplified data management tools. Contact Heather Greer Klein to learn more about any of the web services DuraSpace offers, and to learn about special discounts for new DuraCloud subscribers who are DuraSpace memebers at the Silver level and above.
DuraSpace-euroCRIS Interoperability Event
We’d like to invite you to the first DuraSpace-euroCRIS Interoperability Event with our Strategic Partner euroCRIS.
The DSpace and CRIS Systems one-day Workshop will focus on interoperability between DSpace repositories and CRIS systems iprior to the CRIS 2018 Conference in Umeå, Sweden - on Wednesday, June 13, 2018.
During the DSpace and CRIS systems workshop, DSpace users will have a great opportunity to meet to identify existing examples of integration between DSpace and CRIS systems and to discuss functionalities that DSpace could implement in the future in order to support workflows traditionally associated with Research Information Systems more effectively.
The agenda of the workshop we’ll be published soon, if you’re interested in participating please let us know using this form.
WHERE WE'LL BE THIS SPRING (UPDATE)
COAR Annual Meeting, Hamburg (Germany), May 15-17, Michele Mennielli
Fedora Camp at NASA, May 16-18, David Wilcox, Andrew Woods, Danny Bernstein
CASRAI-CA Reconnect18, Ottawa, Canada, May 23/24 - David Baker
Canadian Association of Research Administrators (CARA) Annual Conference, Ottawa, Canada, May 27-30 - David Baker
CASRAI-UK Reconnect18, Glasgow, UK, June 25/26 - David Baker
CASRAI-EU Reconnect18, Porto, Portugal, June 29 - David Baker, Michele Mennielli
EuroCRIS Conference, Umea, Sweden, June 13-16 - Michele Mennielli, Mike Conlon, David Baker
