Dear Friends,
The winter holiday season is upon us. I am happy to extend warm greetings from everyone here at DuraSpace and sincere best wishes for a healthy and prosperous New Year! We've had an incredible 2018 and are also finishing the year with news of some incredible initiatives, such as:
- DuraSpace received a grant to connect preservation storage services through a common deposit layer based on DuraCloud open source software, to research data preservation in Canada. The project “DuraCloud Canada: Linking Data Repositories to Preservation Storage” is a collaboration with the University of Toronto Libraries , Scholars Portal and COPPUL (Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries) is funded by CANARIE, a vital component of Canada’s digital infrastructure supporting research, education and innovation. Read more here.
- The Leadership Group chairs for the DSpace, Fedora and VIVO communities shared with us news of their upcoming priorities here.
- The Fedora 5.0 third release candidate is out. We're anticipating the release to be out before the new year! Release testing information here.
- The 2019 North American DSpace User Group Meeting will be held at the University of Minnesota April 22, 2019.
- The VIVO Project planned an architectural fly-in meeting to develop architectural approaches to addressing the statement of direction for 2019. You can read more about the fly-in here 2019 Architectural Fly-in.
- The Arks in the Open Project reports progress toward their goal to transition the ARK specification and registry from the California Digital Library to a community supported and managed activity.
- The creation of two new DSpace User Groups in India and Peru which both held inaugural events the week of Dec 3 with a combined attendance of almost 300 people!
We're heartened to be finishing 2018 with so much momentum and are looking forward to more things to come in 2019.
In less happy news, this month we heard the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) will Cease Operations. We want to extend our thanks to the staff at DPN for their service to our community these past years. Consistent with the values we affirmed last year, in the document “Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values,” which we signed, at the core of our digital preservation mission is the belief that “we can accomplish these goals better together rather than separately.” As such, DuraSpace is united with Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust), Chronopolis, HathiTrust and the Texas Digital Library (TDL) in our dedication to continue exploring future collaborative opportunities to support long-term distributed digital preservation.
As always, we are grateful for your support of our work on these and other initiatives aimed at providing enduring access to the world’s digital heritage. We sincerely wish you all the best this December. We look forward to working with you in 2019!
Warm regards,
Erin Tripp
Executive Director
