DuraSpace Membership Newsletter
April 20, 2017
MESSAGE FROM THE CEO
As spring warms up there are several exciting initiatives underway at DuraSpace.
- Thank you to our members who traveled to Albuquerque earlier this month to share ideas for improving DSpace, Fedora and VIVO at the DuraSpace Summit (see report below).
- The 2017 Membership Campaign is underway with the aim of deeply engaging members from all over the world in working together to provide enduring access to the world’s digital heritage.
- One web site We have started work on combining migrating our project and services web sites into a single DuraSpace web site. Based on our Summit discussions and previous strategic evaluation DuraSpace is headed in the direction of integrating across technologies where possible. This effort is coupled with the strategic suggestion from our community that we position the value of our organization “higher” in the scholarly ecosystem food chain to more fully align our mission with the objectives of our partners, collaborators, and customers. In addition we have had appeals from international groups to more clearly define and promote the DuraSpace organization as a whole as the "go-to group" for our suite of open source technologies and hosted services. A unified web presence is step towards this goal.
- other?
Warm regards,
Debra Hanken Kurtz
CEO
A Report from the 2017 DuraSpace Member Summit
The annual DuraSpace Summit report to members was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on April 4-5 following the CNI Spring Member Meeting. DuraSpace Members met to focus on strategy and tactics aimed at broadening and extending the organization’s reach in support of global community ecosystem efforts towards preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage and academic resources.
The Summit took place during a week filled with related events and meetings that included a Fedora Leaders meeting, a DuraSpace Cloud Services strategy session, and VIVO Camp.
Amy Brand, MIT Press Director and DuraSpace Board member offered far-reaching business development ideas in her closing CNI keynote entitled, “Fresh Perspectives on the Future of University-Based Publishing.” Ms. Brand’s innovative views on opportunities for university presses and sustainability models around shared institutional values set the stage for DuraSpace discussions.
DuraSpace Board President Laura Wood welcomed members to the 2017 Summit and introduced the board including new members Kaitlin Thaney and Wolfram Horstmann.
Ms Thaney is an open advocate and Senior Fellow at Mozilla. Most recently she served as the Director of Mozilla Leadership Networks at the Mozilla Foundation, overseeing community-based programs in science, learning, advocacy, Internet of Things, and women and web literacy. Dr. Horstmann is the University Librarian at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Bielefeld University. Previously he was the Associate Director for Digital Library Programmes and IT at The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
Debra Hanken Kurtz, DuraSpace CEO gave the State of DuraSpace plenary emphasizing strong and steady growth, a strategic focus on international engagement, and ideas for increasing revenues going forward.
She reported that for the 12 months ending in December revenue grew 14% or $250,000 over the prior year. Particularly notable was the $132k growth over prior year for cloud services. Organizational expenses increased by less than 2% or $37,000.
Two new staff members will join DuraSpace in 2017. Erin Tripp, who is currently the Business Development Manager at discoverygarden inc. will take on the role of Business Development Manager for DuraSpace on May 1. Michele Mennielli will become the new International Membership and Partnership Manager for DuraSpace this summer. Mr. Mennielli serves on the DSpace Steering Group, the euroCRIS Board and is currently the head of International Business Development at 4Science. He was formerly head of International Business Development for CINECA.
Ms. Hanken Kurtz noted that the efforts of staff members and the financial support of members make it possible to provide a full range of project services “under the DuraSpace umbrella” that include executive and technical leadership, community outreach, effective marketing and communications, business administration, planning for sustainability, fundraising, financial management and business support, governance, community development, managing collaborations, organizational infrastructure, and professional development for our open source projects. This is possible because we share a belief that open source software development ensures that our stakeholder community remains strong and builds capacity for innovation. Ms. Hanken Kurtz advised members to expect communications as the 2017 Membership Campaign was launched in conjunction with the Summit.
Project updates from open source project Steering Group representatives followed.
Maureen Walsh, Ohio State University Libraries, and Michele Mennielli, 4Science, offered an overview of DSpace progress with a focus on the community decision to develop a new, single DSpace UI for DSpace 7. Declan Fleming, UCSD Library, reviewed Fedora community progress and participation towards establishing an API specification, core services, and web standards alignment. Notably the Fedora team led 13 national and international workshops in 2016 with more than 400+ participants. Dean Krafft, Cornell University Library, and Mike Conlon, VIVO Project Director welcomed new VIVO members, reviewed the release of Open VIVO that anyone can join, and encouraged attendees to register for 8th Annual International VIVO Conference in August. Dr. Conlon noted more VIVO progress in 2017 will require more community development effort.
In small groups members investigated activities and tactics that would strengthen the DuraSpace brand and expand the organizational footprint. Ideas and suggestions were discussed and documented for further action based on three topics related to business development:
How to provide greater value to our communities through added services, consulting, and exploratory work
How to engage beyond Canada and the US
What organizations other than the five identified in the strategic plan should we approach and how will we forge strategic partnerships with them?
DSpace, Fedora and VIVO project leaders spent the remainder of the day working on project-specific questions, marketing strategies, policies and related tasks.
Robert Cartolano, DuraSpace Board member and Associate Vice President, Digital Programs and Technology Services at Columbia University Libraries/Information Services offered closing DuraSpace Summit remarks by reminding the audience that DuraSpace is thriving, and moving towards integrated knowledge infrastructure solutions based on feedback from their valued members.
SERVICES
We are pleased to welcome new DSpaceDirect customer Ashesi University College and new DuraCloud customer Colorado College.
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 customersupport@duraspace.org to learn more about any of the web services DuraSpace offers.
