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dspace.org stats: 19,989 visits, 149 countries / territories, 63% new visitors - for August 2009
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 Volume 2, Issue 15
September 2009
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| Popular DSpace Links |
| Who's Using DSpace
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To view previous editions of NewSpace, click here
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DuraSpace Organizational News
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 The DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons officially joined their organizations together in July and formed a new organization, DuraSpace. DuraSpace will support the DSpace platform, the Fedora platform, the Mulgara semantic store, and our new cloud offering DuraCloud (in development).
Over the past few months the DuraSpace team has been developing strategic plans for the new organization as well as re-defining roles and responsibilities to support those plans. Sandy Payette, former the Executive Director of Fedora Commons, is the Chief Executive Officer of DuraSpace. Michele Kimpton now serves as the Chief Business Officer for DuraSpace, focused on strategic partnerships, fundraising and business development. Michele will also serve as the Project Lead for DuraCloud. Brad McLean now serves as DuraSpace's Chief Technology Officer, overseeing technical development on all the projects as well as the infrastructure for the new organization. Brad's move into the overall DuraSpace technology role leaves a vacancy for the DSpace Technical Lead and Developer, for which a search has just been completed. We are pleased to announce that Tim Donohue, a long time DSpace Committer, will be taking on the role in mid-November. For more information about Tim and his new position, read below.
Valorie Hollister will continue to work with the DSpace community as the Director of Community Development.
If you would like to learn more about the roles for the rest of the DuraSpace Team or about the new organization, visit the on the www.duraspace.org site. top
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Tim Donohue to Join DuraSpace Team
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DuraSpace is pleased to announce that Tim Donohue will be joining the DuraSpace organization as technical lead and developer for the DSpace Project in mid-November. He was most recently the Technology Lead for IDEALS, the digital repository for scholarship and research at the University of Illinois. Along with colleagues from University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Illinois, Tim is also one of the lead developers for BibApp, an open source campus research gateway and expert finder.
At the Open Repositories Conference in 2009 and 2007 respectively, Tim won awards for the creation of the "Mention-It" javascript library and the DSpace OpenOffice.org Format Converter.
Tim has been an active Code Committer for DSpace since 2006. One of his initial code contributions included the DSpace configurable submission system. Along with colleagues Dorothea Salo and Scott Phillips, he also helped create the first DSpace "How To Guide", and taught several "Making DSpace Your Own" customization tutorials.
Tim received his Masters in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois in 2005. Prior to that, he worked for a small Chicago-based consulting firm, helping Fortune 500 companies better manage their digital documents. top
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DuraSpace SPARC Open Access Week Contest
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Have you been a part of establishing or maintaining a unique digital repository that provides open access to a collection that was previously not used or under-used? Do you enjoy showcasing your repository's content and/or the cool tools that encourage the use of the materials? Please consider sharing your passion and knowledge for collecting, curating managing and sharing digital repository resources by entering the DuraSpace SPARC Open Access Week Contest and telling your story. The aim of the DuraSpace SPARC Open Access Week Contest is to shine a light on your organization's commitment to online development and dissemination of diverse--and often hidden--digital assets by describing unique cases and serendipitous uses that made something remarkable happen.
Entries will be accepted at the http://duraspace.org/contest.php beginning on Tuesday, September 1, 2009. DuraSpace SPARC Open Access Week Contest winners will be announced on October 1, 2009. Winners will receive $50 Amazon gift certificates and will be invited to tell their stories during the Sun/DuraSpace/SPARC "All About Repositories" Web Seminar on October 14, 2009. This Web Seminar will be made available as part of the DuraSpace SPARC Global Open Access Week celebration October 19-23, 2009.
For more information, click here.top
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DSpace Ambassador Program
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There are currently over 600 DSpace instances in over 70 different countries with a variety of use cases. While there are many helpful resources available to the community, barriers due to geography and language can make it challenging for new or potential DSpace users to connect with the DSpace community. To aide those new to DSpace, the DSpace Global Outreach Committee, with the support and coordination from DuraSpace, will launch the DSpace Ambassador Program in late September.
The main focus of a DSpace Ambassador Program is to identify a DSpace user in every country or region who is willing to be a point of contact for organizations just getting started. These Ambassadors will help new or potential users with general questions about DSpace, as well as providing guidance on additional resources available in the larger DSpace community. The Ambassador is not intended to be a technical expert and instead will point individuals in the right direction for more technical questions. Ideally the Ambassador will also help to identify resources, such as new helpful references or new service providers in their country or region. Some Ambassadors may also be involved in planning regional DSpace user group meetings or trainings. Ambassadors can also leverage their efforts along with other networks, associations and groups that may already exist in their region/country. If you are interested in volunteering to serve as a DSpace Ambassador for your country or region, please contact Valorie Hollister at
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DuraCloud/NDIIPP Pilot Program
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 The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and DuraSpace have announced that they will launch a one-year pilot program to test the use of cloud technologies to enable perpetual access to digital content. The pilot will help define and develop the DuraCloud technology and service, developed and hosted by the DuraSpace organization. Among the NDIIPP partners participating in the DuraCloud pilot program are the New York Public Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
To the full press release on the pilot program, click here.
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Documentation
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| There will be substantial upgrades to the DSpace documentation for version 1.6. Jeffrey Trimble of Youngstown State University has merged known errata, reorganized, and reformatted the manual. Volunteers are needed to review it for clarity and accuracy. For the most current version of the documentation click here. If you find corrections that need to be made please use the DSpace JIRA and submit an issue against the "Documentation" component.top |
1.6 Update - Community Administration
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Development is still continuing for DSpace version 1.6. In this month's newsletter we briefly highlight a newly completed feature known as "Community Administration".
Previous versions of DSpace have allowed System Administrators to delegate permissions at a Collection level, so that individual collections could be managed by a Collection Administrator. Some aspects of this feature have not worked as fully as expected, such as allowing collection administrators to edit existing items. Thanks to the efforts of Tim Donohue and Andrea Bollini, in DSpace 1.6 this administrative feature will be extended and fixed so that permissions can also be delegated at a Community level. As a basic example, your institution's DSpace Administrator will be able to allow an individual college or department to manage their own Community (and any sub-Communities or Collections within it). This means that institutions will be able to manage DSpace in a more decentralized manner and provide more management control directly to colleges, departments or research groups.
If you would like to be involved in the design, development, or testing of DSpace 1.6, please get in contact with the Stuart Lewis. top
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OSGi
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| There is a recent flurry of interest around OSGi in the broader community of open source Java projects for higher education, with design work occurring in both the Sakai and Fedora repository projects. OSGi potentially provides a cross-project component reuse model, although as always, there are no silver bullets. There are a few initiatives beginning in the DSpace community; if this is an area you are working in, or interested in, please contact the DSpace developers at
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or Brad McLean directly. top |
Improve Your Chances of Getting Help
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One of the strengths of the DSpace community is the active participation of users and developers on the DSpace mailing lists for those who may have general and technical questions. As with most open source communities individual's who help answer questions on the mailing list do not represent a commercial help desk, they are all volunteers from the user community who aim to help anyone in need. Occasionally questions to the lists may not be answered, but this quick guide will help improve your chances of you getting the help you need:
BEFORE you post to the mailing list:
- If you have questions about getting started with DSpace, there are a number of resources available on the Quickstart Guide on www.dspace.org.
- If you install or run DSpace, the "Internal Error" message is to prompt your users to come to you. If a user brings the error message to you, the first thing to do is to find out precisely what time the error message appeared. That information will help you check the logs for that time frame. The logs may help describe the error. Both your servlet container (Tomcat, or whatever you chose) and DSpace write detailed logs of significant events. Exactly where those log files are is installation dependent. You should be able to find the Tomcat logs by examining its configuration, and likewise for DSpace.
- If you discover a specific issue, use the "Search" box in the upper right hand corner on the dspace.org website. Search on the issue or error message. This search will review all resources available on dspace.org, the DSpace wiki and the archive of the mailing lists.
- Review the DSpace manual. There is a detailed Table of Contents to help you find a specific topic or you may use the PDF "Find" feature.
ASKING your questions on the mailing list:
- All general inquires about DSpace should be made on the DSpace General list. All technical questions should be made on the DSpace Technical list. Please chose the most relevant list for your question and post your questions to ONLY one list at a time
- Provide detailed information about your DSpace instance. Include the DSpace version you are using, JSPUI or XMLUI (or both), settings, the specific error message you received, log entries, stack traces, etc.
- Keep all DSpace related discussions on the list, as any discussion off list is lost to the larger DSpace community.
- Be patient, if you don't receive an answer, review your question again. One likely reason for no responses is that everyone on the list is stumped and can't even think of a good question to get the ball rolling again. Digging out more information or re-phrasing your question may help. If your question goes unanswered, it may be up to you to solve the problem and then provide the solution for others of the community.
- In addition to the DSpace community there are service providers which offer professional help with regards to DSpace. Click here for a list.
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DSpace in the Blogosphere - Direct from Microsoft Word to DSpace via SWORD
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Stuart Lewis, DSpace Committer from University of Auckland, has added new functionality to DSpace so that it can accept deposits from Microsoft Word by using SWORD. To read more details about Stuart's proof of concept, visit his blog. top
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DSpace User Group Meeting
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Registration is now open for the DSpace User Group Meeting DSUG09!
DSpace represents one of the most successful open source platforms with more than 600 installations worldwide. The aim of the meeting is to share experiences with other users, administrators, developers and to discuss the further possibilities for the DSpace platform and the DuraSpace organization.
The conference will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden on October 14-16. The program includes tutorial session on Manakin, DSpace 1.6 and search engine optimization. In addition to interesting use cases (video digital library, research data), there will bepresentations on BibApp, SWORD integration and managing/enhancing metadata. The progress for networked/federated repositories is also covered by the program with presentations on OceanDocs, COAR and DuraCloud.
For details on the conference program and registration, see: http://dsug09.ub.gu.se/.
Proposals for the poster session can still be submitted. Send an email including title, author and affiliation to
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We are still seeking sponsors for the meeting -- please contact
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for further information. top
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| Conferences and Events |
September 8-11: The International Conferences on Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web 2009 (ICSD2009) in Trento, Italy
September 14-16: 1st Conference for Open Access Scholarly Publishers in Lund, Sweden
September 27-October 2: 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2009) in Corfu, Greece
September 30: Institutional Repositories: Disseminating, Promoting, and Preserving Scholarship in Logan Utah
October 5-6: iPRES 2009 Conference in San Francisco, California
October 5-8: International Conference on Academic Libraries (ICAL-2009) in Delhi, India
October 7-9: Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group Fall Meeting (PASIG) in San Francisco, California
October 14-16: DSpace User Group Meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden
November 3-6: EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado
November 11-13: DLF Fall Forum 2009 in Long Beach, California
November 20-22: International Association for Development of the Information Society International Confernce (IADIS) in Rome, Italy
Dec 2-4: 5th International Digital Curation Conference 2009 (DCC 2009) in London, United Kingdom
December 3-4: Digital Repository Federation International Conference 2009 (DRFIC) in Tokoyo Japan
December 14-15: Coalition for Networked Information Conference 2009 Fall Task Force Meeting in Washington, DC
February 23-26, 2010: International Conference on Digital Libraries (ICDL) in New Delhi, India
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