Category: Digital Repositories

DSpace and Fedora Commons Merge to Form DuraSpace

DSpace and Fedora Commons have merged to form a new organization, DuraSpace.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The joined organization, named "DuraSpace," will sustain and grow its flagship repository platforms – Fedora and DSpace. DuraSpace will also expand its portfolio by offering new technologies and services that respond to the dynamic environment of the Web and to new requirements from existing and future users. DuraSpace will focus on supporting existing communities and will also engage a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders in support of its not-for-profit mission. The organization will be led by an executive team consisting of Sandy Payette (Chief Executive Officer), Michele Kimpton (Chief Business Officer), and Brad McLean (Chief Technology Officer) and will operate out of offices in Ithaca, NY and Cambridge, MA.

"This is a great development," said Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). "It will focus resources and talent in a way that should really accelerate progress in areas critical to the research, education, and cultural memory communities. The new emphasis on distributed reliable storage infrastructure services and their integration with repositories is particularly timely."

Together Fedora and DSpace make up the largest market share of open repositories worldwide, serving over 700 institutions. These include organizations committed to the use of open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation of academic, scientific, and cultural digital content.

"The joining of DSpace and Fedora Commons is a watershed event for libraries, specifically, and higher education, more generally," said James Hilton, CIO of the University of Virginia. "Separately, these two organizations operated with similar missions and a shared commitment to developing and supporting open technologies. By bringing together the technical, financial, and community-based resources of the two organizations, their communities gain a robust organization focused on solving the many challenges involved in storing, curating, and preserving digital data and scholarship," he said.

New Products

DuraSpace will continue to support its existing software platforms, DSpace and Fedora, as well as expand its offerings to support the needs of global information communities. The first new technology to emerge will be a Web-based service named "DuraCloud." DuraCloud is a hosted service that takes advantage of the cost efficiencies of cloud storage and cloud computing, while adding value to help ensure longevity and re-use of digital content. The DuraSpace organization is developing partnerships with commercial cloud providers who offer both storage and computing capabilities.

The DuraCloud service will be run by the DuraSpace organization. Its target audiences are organizations responsible for digital preservation and groups creating shared spaces for access and re-use of digital content. DuraCloud will be accessible directly as a Web service and also via plug-ins to digital repositories including Fedora and DSpace. The software developed to support the DuraCloud service will be made available as open source. An early release of DuraCloud will be available for selected pilot partners in Fall 2009.

Key Benefits of the DuraSpace Organization

DuraSpace will support both DSpace and Fedora by working closely with both communities and when possible, develop synergistic technologies, services, and programs that increase interoperability of the two platforms. DuraSpace will also support other open source software projects including the Mulgara semantic store, a scalable RDF database.

DuraSpace is mission-focused. The organization will be associated with its broader mission of working towards developing services and solutions on behalf of diverse communities rather than focusing on single-solution product development. This change in orientation can be characterized as moving beyond the software and toward the mission.

DuraSpace will bring strength and leadership to a larger community and amplify the value brought by each organization individually. With both organizations working in unison, there can be significant economies of scale, synergies in developing open technologies and services, and a strong position for long-term sustainability.

djatoka Version 1.1/djatoka Viewer Version 2.0 Released

djatoka version 1.1 and djatoka Viewer version 2.0 have been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

djatoka is a Java-based open source image server with an attractive basic feature set and extensibility under control of the community of implementers. Off-the-shelf, djatoka provides compression and region extraction of JPEG 2000 images, URI-addressability of regions, and support for a rich set of input/output image formats (e.g., BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, PNM, TIF, JPEG 2000). djatoka also comes with a plug-in framework that allows transformations to be applied to regions and resolutions (e.g., watermarking).

John Price Wilkin Talks about the Hathi Trust

OCLC has released a new podcast, The Hathi Trust and "The Silence of the Archive" in which Roy Tennant interviews John Price Wilkin, Executive Director, Hathi Trust and AUL for Library Information Technology at the University of Michigan, about the Hathi Trust.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

John makes an amazing prediction about this invigorating collaborative development and also talks about "the silence of the archive," as well as the issues it poses for those interested in preserving our cultural heritage.

SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference

UKOLN's SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) Project was named most innovative project at the JISC Repositories and Preservation conference.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SWORD, whose partners include developers of the DSpace, EPrints, Fedora and IntraLibrary repository software platforms, plus the University of York and CASIS at the University of Wales, has created a mechanism for repositories to deposit and receive deposits via a standard protocol, thus making it possible for different repositories and other applications to move content around more easily. SWORD has received much interest, and a growing community of active developers is building, including Microsoft whose SWORD plug-in can support deposits direct to a repository from within Microsoft Word. FeedForward, a close second for the award, is also SWORD-compliant. Work on SWORD continues within the UKOLN suite of activities.

Fedora 3.2 Released

The Fedora Commons has released Fedora 3.2.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Included in Fedora 3.2 is the long-awaited, web-based administrative client, initial integration with the emerging Akubra storage- abstraction layer, many useful bug fixes, and the experimental release of a Fedora decoupled from the familiar 'fedora' context path.

Read more about it at "Fedora Repository 3.2 Release Notes."

Dryad Repository Gets $2.18 Million Grant from the National Science Foundation

The Dryad Repository has received a $2.18 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The repository, called Dryad, is designed to archive data that underlie published findings in evolutionary biology, ecology and related fields and allow scientists to access and build on each other’s findings.

The grant recipients are:

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Metadata Research Center have been developing Dryad in coordination with a large group of Journals and Societies in evolutionary biology and ecology. With the new grant, the additional team members are contributing to the development of the repository. . . .

Currently, a tremendous amount of information underlying published research findings is lost, researchers say. The lack of data sharing and preservation makes it impossible for the data to be examined or re-used by future investigators.

Dryad addresses these shortcomings and allows scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, integrate data across studies and look for trends through statistical meta-analysis.

"The Dryad project seeks to enable scientists to generate new knowledge using existing data," said Kathleen Smith, Ph.D., principal investigator for the grant, a biology professor at Duke and director of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. "The key to Dryad in our view is making data deposition a routine and easy part of the publication process."

Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: Towards a Vision for Research and Learning in 2013

JISC has released Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: Towards a Vision for Research and Learning in 2013.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The review is structured into two parts. Firstly it makes a number of recommendations targeted at the JISC Executive. The review then goes on to identify a number of milestones of relevance to the wider community that might act as a measure of progress towards the wider vision of enhanced scholarly communication. Achievement of these milestones would be assisted by JISC through its community work and funding programmes. The review addresses repositories for research outputs, research data and learning materials in separate sections.

DigitalKoans

IR Deposit Using Embedded Document Metadata: Deposit Plait: Final Report

JISC has released Deposit Plait: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The aim of the Deposit Plait project was to examine potential for easing the deposit of journal articles into institutional repositories by making use of any metadata embedded within the document properties of the document being deposited. . . .

The first stage of the project was to see how easy it is to extract this metadata. The target file formats that the project worked with were the Open Document Format (as created by OpenOffice), OpenXML (as created by Microsoft Office 2007), and .doc files (as created by version of Microsoft Office from 97 to 2003). There are standard open source software libraries that can extract both standard and custom metadata fields from each of these file forms.

The second stage of the project was to see how easy it is to use extracted metadata as search terms in order to search for a more complete metadata record. In the case where the item being deposited into the repository has been in existence for some time (it is a 'retrospective deposit') then metadata found can be used to perform a search. Different search methods were implemented as examples, including using search APIs, and screen scraping from search services. Whilst the method works fine, there are the normal licensing issues to consider, and whether licences cover the user for this type of metadata re-use.

The project concluded by creating an online demonstration system. In contrast to a normal repository deposit where the user enters metadata, and then uploads a file, this system requires the user to first upload a file. The metadata is extracted, and the user is allowed to choose which (one or more) of the fields to use as the basis of a search. The search is then initiated and matching records returned. The user can then pick and choose fields from the results the 'plait' together their final metadata record.

DigitalKoans

JISC Project: Lifespan Initiative for the Research and Data Archive Repository

JISC's Lifespan Initiative for the Research and Data Archive Repository project started on 4/1/09.

Here's an excerpt from the project Web page:

The Lifespan Collection (www.lifespancollection.org.uk) represents an existing and unique research data set, which includes around 3,400 hours of audio-taped interviews, scorings and quantitative computerised data, capturing the lifetime experience of over 500 individuals. The outcomes of this project will be presented in terms of both a report on the processes and best-practice solutions for preserving and digitalising the data, including the creation of processes of submission of, and accessibility to, current and future critical datasets that ensure compliance with data security, copyright legislation, licensing, and associated audit functions. One or more detailed case studies will be produced that will not only inform the future development of this project but will act as illustrative examples for use by other similar start-up projects. This will lay the ground work for an exemplar implementation of the tools and solutions already delivered by JISC and other institutions.

DigitalKoans

OAI-PMH: MOAI Server 1.0 Released

Infrae has released the MOAI Server 1.0, an open source OAI-PMH application.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

MOAI is an open access server platform for institutional repositories. The server aggregates content from disparate sources, transforms it, stores it in a database, and (re)publishes the content, in one or many OAI feeds. Each feed has its own configuration.

The server has a flexible system for combining records into sets and uses these sets in the feed configuration. MOAI also comes with a simple yet flexible authentication scheme that can easily be customized. Besides providing authentication for the feeds, the authentication also controls access to the assets.

MOAI is a standalone system that can be used in combination with any repository software that comes with an OAI feed such as Fedora Commons, EPrints or DSpace. It can also be used directly with an SQL database or just a folder of XML file. . . .

MOAI has the ability to:

  • Harvest data from different kinds of sources
  • Serve many OAI feeds from one MOAI Server, each with their own configuration
  • Turn metadata values into OAI sets on the fly, creating new collections
  • Use OAI sets to filter records shown in a feed, configurable for each feed
  • Work easily with relational data (e.g. if an author changes, the publication should also change)
  • Provide simple and robust authentication through integration with the Apache webserver
  • Serve assets through Apache while still using configurable authentication rules

DigitalKoans

Summary of DSpace Community Network Survey Results

A brief summary of the recent DSpace Community Network Survey results is now available.

Here's an excerpt:

  • Type of institution: 83% of respondents represent academic institutions, 19% research centers, 10% archive/public library, 10% government *
  • Number of items: More than half of the respondents have 2,500 or less items in their repositories, only 15% have 10,000 or more items . . . .
  • Modifications to software: 54% minor cosmetic, 29% new features, 29% significant UI customizations, 23% no changes, 8% core code changes*

*Many of the questions allowed for multiple answers, therefore some of the numbers and percentages represent multiple answers from the same respondent.

Presentations from SCARP Workshop: Building and Curating Online Video Corpora

Presentations from the SCARP Workshop: Building and Curating Online Video Corpora are now available.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This was a meeting of researchers and stakeholders in data service provision to discuss curation issues raised in our SCARP case study on the roles and re-usability of video data in social studies of interaction. This event aimed to raise mutual awareness of research communities' practices and needs for archiving, sharing and re-using digital video data; and identify how local and national research data services may contribute to the infrastructure for video data curation.

CLARION (Chemical Laboratory Repository In/Organic Notebooks) Project Funded

JISC has funded the CLARION (Chemical Laboratory Repository In/Organic Notebooks) project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

So an important part of CLARION will be developing the means for working with scientists to expose their data at the appropriate time. CLARION will expand to include a variety of spectral data, both from central analytical services and from individual labs. Another key aspect of CLARION is that we shall be integrating it with a commercial electronic laboratory notebook (eLNb). We're in the process of evaluating offerings and expect to make an announcement soon. This will be a key opportunity to see how feasible it is to integrate a standard system with the needs of a departmental repository. The protocols may be harder but we'll have the experience from the crystallography band spectroscopy. An important aspect is that we are keen to develop the Open Data idea globally and we's be very interested from other groups who are doing –or thinking of doing –similar things.

Blended Research and Learning Object Repository: JISC Final Report—CIRCLE

The Oxford Brookes University's Common Institutional Repositories for Collaborative Learning Environments (CIRCLE) project has released JISC Final Report—CIRCLE.

Here's an excerpt:

The university has established a pilot repository system, linked to the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that can be used for storing both teaching and research objects. The project has allowed us to look in depth at the needs of a wide range of stakeholders, including schools, researchers, Library staff, central IT staff and students. . . .

The software chosen for the project (Intralibrary) was developed as a learning object repository, and so a large part of our work involved configuring the software to deal with research outputs. Although Intralibrary can be adapted to deal with research, the project found that further work was needed for the software to meet all the requirements of the pilot groups. The university has an urgent need to establish a research archive and has therefore decided to pilot an alternative repository solution called Equella from The Learning Edge International. This follow-up project is called RADAR (Research Archive and Digital Asset Repository).

We feel that the knowledge and experience gained during the CIRCLE project have been extremely valuable and have paved the way for the development and rollout of the university’s repository. We have also explored the wider relationship between the repository and content management systems already in use in schools, ranging from Intranet to bespoke systems. The project has made a start on a co-ordinated approach to managing digital assets that will have clear benefits for schools and the university as a whole.

UC Press and the California Digital Library Announce University of California Publishing Services

The University of California Press and the California Digital Library have announced their new University of California Publishing Services unit.

Here's an excerpt from the post:

This integrated system combines print distribution, sales, and marketing services offered by UC Press with the open access digital publishing services provided by the California Digital Library through eScholarship. UCPubS is part of the University of California's broader effort to ensure a sustainable scholarly publishing system in the service of research and teaching.

DSpace Sites: What Do You Want in Version 1.6?

The DSpace Committers Group is conducting a short survey about desired features in DSpace version 1.6.

Here's an excerpt from the "DSpace 1.6: You Decide!":

As you'll have seen from recent emails, the DSpace community has now released version 1.5.2 of the DSpace software. It has many new features, some enhancements to current features, and some bug fixes. Many of you will also know that a small team of developers have been working on DSpace version 2.0 which will bring with it many essential architectural enhancements to ensure that DSpace continues to fulfil the needs of the user community over the coming years. DSpace 2.0 is likely to be released early in 2010.

n the mean time, the DSpace committers have decided to start working on DSpace version 1.6. By moving to 1.6 (rather than 1.5.3) we can add new features that require changes to underlying DSpace database. We can’t tell you just yet what new features will be in version 1.6 because we haven’t decided! And that is where you come in . . .

John Robertson Overviews Digital Repository Software Developments

John Robertson of JISC CETIS has overviewed developments in major digital repository software in his "Repository Software Update" post.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the past couple of months I've had a chance to hear updates from a number of repository software developers (at a Fedora training day, at DEV8D and on a number of blogs). Albeit slightly delayed by holidays, here's a bit of a snapshot of where ePrints, DSpace, Fedora, Microsoft's repository are at. There's a lot more information about Fedora than the others as I've heard a couple of updates from them. The usual caveat that I may have misunderstood what some of these are or how developed they are should apply. Much of this development is building up to releases at Open Repositories 2009.

Open Grid Forum Digital Repositories Research Group Established

The Open Grid Forum has established a Digital Repositories Research Group.

Here's an excerpt from the home page:

The goal of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) is to analyze how digital repositories can be built on top of federated storage infrastructure, focusing on the exploitation of existing data-related standards and the identification of need for new or revised data-related standards.

“Name Authority Control in Institutional Repositories”

Dorothea Salo has self-archived "Name Authority Control in Institutional Repositories" in MINDS@UW.

Here's an excerpt:

Neither the standards nor the software underlying institutional repositories anticipated performing name authority control on widely disparate metadata from highly unreliable sources. Without it, though, both machines and humans are stymied in their efforts to access and aggregate information by author. Many organizations are awakening to the problems and possibilities of name authority control, but without better coordination, their efforts will only confuse matters further. Local heuristics-based name-disambiguation software may help those repository managers who can implement it. For the time being, however, most repository managers can only control their own name lists as best they can after deposit while they advocate for better systems and services.

Draft Report on the Provision of Usage Data and Manuscript Procedures for Publishers and Repository Managers

The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project has released Draft Report on the Provision of Usage Data and Manuscript Procedures for Publishers and Repository Managers.

Here's an excerpt:

This draft report sets out specifications for deposit procedures for both publishers and authors, and the reporting in log files of subsequent usage. Since this report is presented in draft format, it is anticipated that such specification will be adjusted as a result of actual implementation experience. Until the ultimate formulation of specifications and guidelines is achieved, a support mechanism is envisaged to assist both publisher and repository communities to share the experience gained. . .

This report is designed to be preliminary investigation of the issues addressed herein. As such, it forms the basis for a common understanding of the expected outcomes of the PEER project, and it highlights the issues of concern that need to be monitored and evaluated in the final report. Significantly, it indicates workflows, procedures and best practices that will be explored towards the establishment of best practice shared by publisher and library communities to ensure the future of scholarly communication.

DSpace 1.5.2 Stable Released

DSpace 1.5.2 Stable has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This release is primarily a bug fix release incorporating numerous bug fixes and enhancements.

We want to highlight the following additions:

  • SWORD module/version 1.3.1 supporting the sword standard version 1.3
  • cocoon upgraded to 2.2
  • fix for the UTF-8 issues with the XMLUI
  • new authentication methods: Hierarchical LDAP and Shibboleth
  • full update translations: German, Italian for both XMLUI and JSPUI and Ukrainian for JSPUI
  • new translations for 1.5.x: Greek and Thai
  • graceful resolver for urn in the item page for the JSPUI

Digital Video on Northwestern’s Mounting Books Project

The Northwestern University Library has made a digital video available about their Mounting Books Project.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract of a presentation on the project that will be given at Open Repositories 2009:

The Northwestern University Library undertook a software development project to create an automated workflow to enable files from its Kirtas book scanner to be both linked to the OPAC with a page viewer application, and ingested into its Fedora repository as archivally sustainable and reusable digital objects. The web-based Book Workflow Interface (BWI) software utilizes jBPM for management and web services for key creation components. It also features an AJAX interface to support drag-and-drop creation and editing of METS-based book structures. The BWI system ingests locally scanned texts as well as texts digitized by external partners or vendors.

Center for Research Libraries to Assess and Certify Portico and HathiTrust

The Center for Research Libraries will conduct detailed assessments of Portico and HathiTrust with the objective of certifying them as trustworthy digital repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Portico has agreed to cooperate with the CRL audit, with the goal of certification as a trustworthy digital repository. HathiTrust has asked CRL to assess its digital repository, which includes not only Google Books digitization content but a considerable amount of non-Google content as well.

Concurrently CRL is working with LOCKSS to assess the capabilities of the LOCKSS system for harvesting and archiving digitized primary source materials and related metadata. CRL is also gathering information about regional efforts to host licensed digital content locally. . . .

The general metrics to be used in the assessments will be the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification checklist (TRAC).  CRL has formed a panel of advisors who represent the various sectors of its membership, to further inform the assessment process.  The Certification Advisory Panel will ensure that the certification process addresses the interests of the entire CRL community, and will include leaders in collection development, preservation, and information technology.