DuraSpace Membership Newsletter
August 18, 2016

MESSAGE FROM THE CEO

The summer has flown by–I hope everyone has had some vacation time to recharge! I enjoyed seeing many of you in Charlottesville at the SHARE Annual Meeting in July. The presentations were interesting, and as usual, conversations at breaks helped spark new ideas for collaborations. This summer we've focused on establishing greater working relationships with global partners in talks with Mark Leggott at Research Data Canada, Kathleen Shearer at COAR, and Michele Mennielli at CINECA about ways to collaborate to promote open data and research internationally. I look forward to sharing details about these efforts in the coming months.

This week I am in Denver, Colorado to participate in the 7th Annual VIVO Conference. The conference is an excellent opportunity to meet with researchers and administrators from around the world to learn more about VIVO at their institutions, and to explore new opportunities. A detailed conference schedule can be found online at http://www.vivoconference.org/.  

Finally, thanks to all of you for renewing your DuraSpace memberships and for your commitment to community-supported open source software. If you have colleagues at institutions who have not yet become members, please let me know and I will reach out to them.

It is always good to remember that while we need paid memberships to sustain our work together, we also need strong, vibrant communities to grow our projects and meet ongoing needs. Thanks to all of you who are involved in leadership, training, code contribution, and other vital community activities. You are the reason we're here! 

I look forward to seeing many of you at conferences and meetings this fall (see "Where We'll Be" below) Until then, enjoy the rest of the summer!

Warm regards,

Debra Hanken Kurtz

CEO


2016 Membership update

Many thanks to our members who have already renewed their membership for 2016, and to those who have joined DuraSpace for the first time as new members. Members have so far contributed $938,750; 117 members joining DuraSpace in the vital effort to provide technical leadership, sustainability planning, fundraising, community development, marketing and communications, collaborations and strategic partnerships and administration to the DSpace, Fedora and VIVO projects. Read more here.

Here's the breakdown:

Total: $938,750; 117 members; 75% of budget

  • DSpace: $174,500; 65% of budget
  • Fedora: $487,250; 84% of budget
  • VIVO: $204,500; 63% of budget
  • General: $72,500; 91% of budget    

PROJECTS

FEDORA 

Fedora project community members are on the road all over the world this fall–from Germany, Switzerland, and the US you can touch base face-to-face with team members in multiple locations. See "Where We'll Be" below. Activities include training and opportunities to learn more about the growing Fedora community of users and developers. 

We are pleased to announce that Fedora Camp in NYC, hosted by Columbia University Libraries, will be offered at Columbia University’s Butler Library in New York City November 28-30, 2016. Training will begin with the basics and build toward more advanced concepts–no prior Fedora 4 experience is required. Participants can expect to come away with a deep dive Fedora 4 learning experience coupled with multiple opportunities for applying hands-on techniques working with experienced trainers and Fedora gurus. Register today [2] and join us in New York!

The Fedora community is continuing work towards establishing a clearly defined specification for the core Fedora services that will benefit members who are integrating unique functionality using Fedora. This specification will detail the exact services and interactions required for a server implementation to be verified as "doing Fedora".  You are invited to comment on and contribute to the draft specifications.
One of the design goals of Fedora is to simplify the process of both getting your resources into and out of Fedora in a standardized way. This enables the reuse of Fedora resources in other contexts, such as exporting to a separate preservation system, as well as provides a pathway for migrating across Fedora installations. Please see the planning page for details if you are interested and available to participate in this effort.

DSPACE

Now that summer holidays are coming to a close work continues toward the public release of DSpace 6.0 due later this month. Thanks to those members who have pitched in to test release candidates and identify areas of improvement over the last two months.

What to look for in DSpace 6.0:

VIVO

This week the VIVO community kicks off the 7th Annual VIVO Conference in Denver with workshops, keynotes, invited speakers, panels, project sessions and more. A focus on OpenVIVO, a VIVO that anyone can join, and a panel discussion, "Persistent Identifiers: Where we are now and the role of Networking Profile Systems in Shaping Their Future" are among many conference highlights.

VIVO 1.9 was released on August 8, 2016 with several significant new features that will improve the user experience and make it simpler to implement VIVO. The new Capability Map feature matches research areas with experts in a visual interface that allows users to see the relationship between research areas and researchers. Read more here.

You can help VIVO by participating in a short survey of all organizations considering VIVO, implementing VIVO or maintaining VIVO.  The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete and does not require technical expertise.  Please help us set new directions for VIVO by sharing your thoughts and experiences with us.  The survey is anonymous.  We would be happy to hear from each member of the VIVO community.  Survey results will be tabulated and presented in a poster at the VIVO Conference and on this wiki following the conference.

Please take 10 minutes to share your thoughts about VIVO with us.  The survey is here: https://goo.gl/rkr964

SERVICES

The suite of DuraSpace Web Services

DuraSpace has solutions. Our suite of reliable, fully hosted cloud-based web services built on open source software are priced to make them affordable. We invite you to consider how DuraCloud, a managed service for archiving content in the cloud;  DSpaceDirect, a hosted, turnkey repository solution; and ArchivesDirect, a complete, hosted archiving solution, might streamline your organization's digital workflow and jump start innovation.

Besides being economical, DuraSpace services are built on solid open source software platforms and require very little effort to start up. Why? Because part of DuraSpace web services value is in personalized on-boarding support and training that are provided at no extra cost. DuraSpace staff experts work directly with service customers to spin up an institutional repository, provide open access to digital collections, and/or to preserve valuable digital content. Our services provide transformative organizational value-global open access to institutional resources, preservation of treasured collections, simplified data management tools, and superb customer service.

DuraSpace Web Services include ArchivesDirect, DSpaceDirect, and DuraCloud. Learn more about any of the hosted services DuraSpace offers, please visit their web sites or contact info@duracloud.org.


WHERE WE'LL BE

VIVO Conference, Debra, Mike, Graham
TPDL - David
Fedora DC Users - Andrew
Hydra Connect - Andrew
iPRES - David
Bern Fedora User Group - David
Fedora Camp - Andrew, David
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