DuraSpace has released DSpace 1.6.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Community-requested features in the new release include an enhanced statistics package which provides more information about how your repository is being used, an embargo facility so items can be kept dark for a period of time, and a batch metadata editing tool which can be used to change, add, find/replace metadata as well as facilitate mass moves, re-order values or add new items in bulk. And there’s more such as authority control which contains an integration with the Sherpa Romeo Service for publisher names, as well as the Library of Congress Nameservice. Other new features include:

• Delegated administration
• OpenSearch
• Command launcher
• OAI-PMH harvesting of items from remote repositories
• Configurable OAI-PMH dublin core output
• Move item functionality in XMLUI
• If-Modified-Since / Last-Modified header support in XMLUI
• Change to logging behaviour to ensure better log retention and management
• Update to the latest handle server library
• Ability to perform batch imports and exports from zip files of items
• New test scripts to test database and email settings
• Ability to set legal jurisdiction in creative commons licensing

Eric Jansson has self-archived "DSpace Manakin UI: Case Study of Value and Costs" in the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education's repository.

Here's an excerpt from:

Our experience in this project pointed towards three main ideas:

• Many smaller institutions are staffed sufficiently to use the Manakin technology for branding and interface tweaking, as they can leverage web development skills, providing that system administration support for maintaining a development DSpace is available.
• Development of advanced Manakin themes (defined as development that significantly alters, removes, or rearranges interface components, or that integrates new functionality into the interfaces) is comparable to web-application development in terms of complexity. As such, more advanced development is only likely to succeed for institutions whose staffing includes a dedicated expert in web application development, and one who is familiar with XML technologies (i.e. XML, XPath, XSL), and possibly AJAX, and Javascript.
• Smaller institutions with more advanced goals should consider working together and using outside expertise in theme development. Outside expertise could be supplied through partnering with other institutions pursuing Manakin development projects or through vendors.

Read more about it at "Using Manakin to Expand the Capabilities of DSpace Repositories."

Presentations and other materials from the DSpace User Group Meeting 2009 are now available.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Over 90 participants from 20 different countries attended the fall DSUG 2009 meeting. In addition to the European community, DSpace users from the United States, Brazil, New Zealand and Singapore were in attendance. Copies of the presentations and video recordings are now available for most of the sessions.

MIT has launched a new collection of authors' final submitted manuscripts in DSpace@MIT, the MIT Open Access Articles Collection.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The launch of the "MIT Open Access Articles" collection coincides with International Open Access Week to reflect the spirit of an MIT faculty policy established in March 2009.

The policy affirms the faculty's commitment "to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible."

The collection consists of the authors' final submitted manuscripts. Published versions may also appear where the publisher's policy allows for such posting. Both versions are identified for readers.

MIT authors are encouraged to send their papers to oapolicysubmissions@mit.edu or use a web form for inclusion in the collection.

The MIT Libraries are administering the policy under the guidance of the Faculty Committee on the Library System, and are maintaining a list of publishers who are fully cooperating with the policy.

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JISC has released the ICE-TheOREM Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

ICE-TheOREM was a project which made several important contributions to the repository domain, promoting deposit by integrating the repository with authoring workflows and enhancing open access by prototyping new infrastructure to allow fine-grained embargo management within an institution without impacting on existing open access repository infrastructure.

In the area of scholarly communications workflows, the project produced a complete end-to-end demonstration of eScholarship for word processor users, with tools for authoring, managing and disseminating semantically-rich ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) documents fully integrated with supporting data. This work is focused on theses, as it is well understood that early career researchers are the most likely to lead the charge in new innovations in scholarly publishing and dissemination models.

The authoring tools are built on the ICE content management system, which allows authors to work within a word processing system (as most authors do) with easy-to-use toolbars to structure and format their documents. The ICE system manages both small data files and links to larger data sets. The result is research publications which are available not just as paper-ready PDF files but as fully interactive semantically aware web documents which can be disseminated via repository software such as ePrints, DSpace and Fedora as complete supported web-native and PDF publications.

JISC has released SWORD2 Project Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The SWORD vision is about 'lowering the barriers to deposit', primarily for depositing content into repositories, and additionally, for depositing into any system which may wish to receive content from remote sources. The SWORD protocol defines a standard mechanism for depositing into repositories and other systems. The project and protocol were developed because there was previously no standardised way of doing this. A standard deposit interface allows repository services to be built that can offer functionality such as deposit from multiple locations, e.g. disparate repositories, desktop drag'n'drop tools, or from within standard office applications. SWORD can also facilitate deposit to multiple repositories, increasingly important for depositors who wish to deposit to funder, institutional or subject repositories. There are many other possibilities, including migration of content between repositories and transfer to preservation services. In addition to refining the existing SWORD application profile, the SWORD2 project has developed a number of tools and services to demonstrate these possibilities. It has also been pro-active in promoting SWORD and encouraging uptake within other repositories, services and tools, notably with its adoption into the Microsoft Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 and with the new Microsoft Zentity repository system .

The core aims of the project were to update the SWORD Protocol, the SWORD repository code libraries in the DSpace, Fedora, EPrints and Intrallect repositories, and the existing reference demonstrators. A Facebook application and validator have also been developed. Advocacy efforts include an e-learning case study, a briefing paper, a new SWORD website, and a range of additional dissemination activities, including conference papers, presentations, demonstrations and workshops at a number of national and international conferences and meetings.

JISC has released JISC Final Report—CTREP, Cambridge TETRA Repositories Enhancement Project .

Here's an excerpt:

CTREP created a connector between an Institutional VRE and an Institutional Repository. It is designed to be reusable in a number of different institutions where policy on deposit varies by means of a flexible deposit configuration system. In the process of executing the project:

• the various stakeholders came to understand institutional cultural differences and address them in such a way that recent projects with a strong Repository and research dissemination/visualisation aspect have been more joined up than would previously have been possible
• we developed an approach to policy expression designed both to avoid creating unnecessary tension within the institution during its development, and also to be authorable by a wide range of individuals
• we have sought to record and capture lessons learnt (based, in part on case studies) for future institutionalisation projects
• we developed a number of techniques which allowed apparent barriers to integration to be overcome by technical-architectural tools
• we open-sourced the integration
• we modified our approach to metadata/data binding in light of community feedback and developed a spreadsheet-based automated approach with which contributors felt comfortable, but which required a number of technical obstacles to be overcome through the use of creative programming techniques.

Tim Donohue, Research Programmer at IDEALS, has made his "Making DSpace 1.5 Your Own: Customizations via Overlays" presentation available on SlideShare.

In "Direct from MS Word to DSpace via SWORD," Stuart Lewis describes how to get documents into DSpace from Word via SWORD and a custom DSpace ingester.

Here's an excerpt:

This complete end to end process allows you to create Word templates, and to mark them up with required and optional fields. It also allows you to embed details of the SWORD deposit repository URL (so the users do not need to know what it is) within the template for easy deposit. This could be used for example for a journal editor to provide a template and a deposit location for new paper submissions all-in-one.

Presentations from the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries 2009 are now available.

Here's those by Texas Digital Library staff:

• Adding OAI-ORE Support to Repository Platforms
• Introducing Vireo: ETD Submittal and Management for DSpace
• Texas Digital Library Services
• Texas Digital Library Services Preservation Network