The DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons have received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support planning for DuraSpace.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Over the next six months funding from the planning grant will allow the organizations to jointly specify and design "DuraSpace," a new web-based service that will allow institutions to easily distribute content to multiple storage providers, both "cloud-based" and institution-based. The idea behind DuraSpace is to provide a trusted, value-added service layer to augment the capabilities of generic storage providers by making stored digital content more durable, manageable, accessible and sharable.

Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation, said, "Together we can leverage our expertise and open source value proposition to continue to provide integrated open solutions that support the scholarly mission of universities."

Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, observes, "There is an important role for high-tech non-profit organizations in adding value to emerging cloud solutions. DuraSpace is designed with an eye towards enabling universities, libraries, and other types of organizations to take advantage of cloud storage while also addressing special requirements unique to areas such as digital archiving and scholarly communication."

The grant from the Mellon Foundation will support a needs analysis, focus groups, technical design sessions, and meetings with potential commercial partners. A working web-based demonstration will be completed during the six-month grant period to help validate the technical and business assumptions behind DuraSpace.

In "INFORMAL Comparison of Some Institutional Repository Solutions," Neil Godfrey briefly describes seven institutional repository systems: Digital Commons, DigiTool, DSpace, EPrints, Equella, Fez, VITAL. (Thanks to Roy Tennant at TechEssence.info.)

Presentations from the Institutional and National Services for Research Data Management Workshop at the Oxford Said Business School are now available.

Here's a selection:

• The Archaeology Data Service, A Subject Specific Digital Repository
• A Grand Challenge for the Information Age
• Legal Issues Relevant to Digital Repositories
• Tools for Managing Research Data: the Data Audit Framework (DAF) and DRAMBORA
• The UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) Feasibility Study

The Fedora Commons has released Fedora 3.1.

It has also released Fedora 2.2.4, a maintenance upgrade to the prior version of the system.

Read more about it at "Fedora 3.1 and Fedora 2.2.4 Now Available."

Presentations from the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference are available.

Here's a brief selection:

• Australian Women’s Archives Project 2.0—Next Generation Infrastructure for Women's Studies
• Data Grid Storage for Digital Libraries and Archives Based on iRODS
• Lessons from the Institute for Data Intensive Science and Engineering
• A Summary of the Outputs of the ARCHER Project
• Transforming the Study of Australian Literature through a Collaborative eResearch Environment

The School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is seeking applicants for three-year doctoral fellowships in Digital Curation. The application deadline is January 1, 2009.

The RAND Corporation has released Embracing the Future: Embedding Digital Repositories in the University of London. (Thanks to Resource Shelf.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals.

The National Institute of Informatics has launched JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online) in test mode. JAIRO allows federated searching of Japanese institutional repositories. It currently includes 84 repositories containing around 540,000 items.

The Repository Records Statistics (aka ircount) service has a new Web site, and it has expanded its coverage beyond the UK to include weekly record counts from digital repositories around the globe (beta mode).

Catherine Mitchell, Acting Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at the California Digital Library, has been named as the permanent occupant of that post. In this capacity, Mitchell is responsible for the eScholarship Repository, eScholarship Editions, the Mark Twain Project Online, and other ventures.

In her statement about the appointment, Laine Farley, CDL Interim Executive Director, said:

Catherine has held the position on an interim basis since November 2007. During that time, she has led the group to develop a new services-oriented vision and to launch an ambitious redesign of the eScholarship interface. She was also the project manager for the Mark Twain project which successfully launched last November. Catherine’s dedication, deep understanding of scholarly communication, publishing issues, and professionalism are admired by all of us who work with her.

Presentations from ARROW's Repository Day meeting are now available. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

See the DigitalKoans post "Digital Repositories in Australia: Blog Reports on ARROW Repository Day" for links to Chris Rusbridge's posts about Repository Day.

JISC has made available a number of widgets for repository-related services, such as JULIET, OpenDOAR, SWORD, and RoMEO, that can be used on iGoogle, Netvibes, and similar systems. ICO3 developed the widgets for JISC.

You can see the widgets in action at JISC's Netvibes demo page.