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dspace.org stats: 26,599 visits, 152 countries / territories, 67% new visitors - for April 2010
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 Volume 3, Issue 20
May 2010
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| Popular DSpace Links |
| Who's Using DSpace
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| New & Upcoming Sites |
Visit the new and improved DSpace Registry! There are now over 800 DSpace repositories in over 80 countries. We begin identifying new instances again in the DuraSpace Blogdigest due out later this month.
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To view previous editions of NewSpace, click here
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DuraSpace Digest Replaces NewSpace
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 Later this month, the DSpace community will receive the DuraSpace Blogdigest, which will replace the distribution of this newsletter. The content of the blogdigest will include information designed for the DSpace community, keeping you up-to-date on the latest news about software releases, DSpace events as well as more general information on activities in the broader community. As many of you may already be aware, the DuraSpace organization has been producing the monthly blogdigest which serves both Fedora and DSpace users, in an easy-to-read outline format so you can zero in and read topics of interest quickly. By consolidating into one monthly news vehicle we hope to provide more streamlined content for the community.
We look forward to your feedback as we continue to improve the way we disseminate news and information for the DSpace community.
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New and Improved DSpace Registry
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Have you ever wondered which institutions have upgraded to the most recent version of DSpace or which repositories have video files stored?
DuraSpace is pleased to announce a new resource, the community DSpace Registry.
The database was conceived of and designed by members of the DSpace Global Outreach Committee (DGOC) to address one of the biggest challenges within the DSpace user community; not just to identify which institutions used DSpace, but also cultivate a resource with some basic information about those repositories to help facilitate connections between users. The work started early last year and included a Community Networking Survey, which gathered data about repositories and seeded the information now available in the database.
Members of the DSpace community will now be able to search the database to discover other institutions which have similar repositories, environments or interests to their own. The hope of DGOC and the DuraSpace organization is that this listing will help foster all types of connections and collaborations in the future.
What is new?
The most popular page on the dspace.org site for the last few years has been the "Who's Using DSpace?" page. This page was a simple list of DSpace repositories with only the institution name, country and URL link listed. The list was not easily searchable or sortable.
The new DSpace repositories database provides much more information and functionality. And there are now over 800 known repositories included in the database, representing over 80 countries.
Main Table View
The main database view provides you with a sortable table of all known DSpace instances. It includes the institution name, country, type of institution (academic, museum, government, etc), DSpace version/user interface and the URL link. This list can be re-ordered by any of the fields listed -- so if you want to get a quick view of who is using 1.6 XML/Manakin it can be done in an instant by clicking on the column header.
Detailed Repository View
To view all the available information about a specific repository (use case, file types stored, type of content stored, addons/extensions, database, operating system, etc), you simply click on the institution name. You will then view all the information available in the database about that particular repository.
Search/Filters
On the left hand side there is a number of search filters, including an open text search which you can use to perform a single or multi-faceted search and will produce a listing of those institutions which meet your selected criteria.
How can you add or update your institution's information?
The information available in the repositories database is limited to what has been provided by the institution either by registering previously on dspace.org, the ROAR listing or by responding to the April 2009 Community Networking Survey. We would love to help foster more connections. Please take the time to register or to update your repository's information by making use of the registration form for new listings or update form for existing listings. Please note that we expect updates to existing listings may take a few days to show up in the database and we ask for your patience.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the DGOC for their design and review work on this project. Thanks also to Valorie Hollister, Director of Community Development, DSpace Project/DuraSpace for driving the project forward and to Lauren L'Esperance, DSpace.org webmaster who worked out all the technical pieces.
We look forward to hearing your feedback and comments about the new DSpace Registry. Please contact Valorie Hollister at vhollister[at]duraspace.org directly.
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Release Planning
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Over the last few months, the DSpace committers and developers have reviewed the current release procedures, timelines, etc. There is much we have all learned in recent releases (1.4.x, 1.5.x, 1.6.0) which could help us to streamline or take steps towards improving the release process in the future.
To begin, everyone in the community was invited to brainstorm on how our current development and release processes could be improved. There were several ideas posted on the wiki Proposals page by the community and a transcript of the IRC developers' meeting discussing the various proposals can be viewed here.
Recently, several of the developers' meetings have in part been devoted to the release process. The DSpace committers and developers have agreed to the following changes thus far:
1) To set a timed release schedule, where major releases are performed at regular intervals. Our next major release, 1.7.0, has already been scheduled for December 2010. After the 1.7.0 release, we will reanalyze to determine the regular interval for all major releases.
2) To still release minor, bug-fix only releases as necessary. The next minor release, 1.6.1, has already been scheduled for late May 2010. We've decided that minor releases will only contain bug-fixes, and should be released only when necessary (i.e. only when bugs have been located that require more immediate attention).
3) To solicit assistance and feedback from the broader community through a group representing both repository managers and developers. This group would provide additional support to the Release Coordinator, while also allowing more opportunities for non-techies to take a more active part in the evolution of DSpace. More details about this proposed group are available on the wiki.
We anticipate the release process will evolve for the next few releases cycles and invite everyone (developers, administrators, repository managers, etc) to continue to provided feedback on the current proposals/ideas. We cannot guarantee that all proposed changes would be integrated immediately into the next cycle, but this is an opportunity for the entire community to think about what we'd like to do differently and make small steps in that direction. Please feel free to contact Tim Donohue at tdonohue[@]duraspace.org or Valorie Hollister at vhollister[@]duraspace.org with any comments, questions or concerns.
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DSpace 1.6.1 and 1.7.0
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The DSpace Developers have two upcoming releases to announce to the DSpace Community.
1.6.1
DSpace 1.6.1 is scheduled for release on Friday, May 21, 2010.
DSpace 1.6.1 is a bug-fix release which will resolve various bugs/issues that people have noticed in 1.6.0. This release will not introduce any new features, but will resolve over 20-25 bugs/issues that have been located since 1.6.0 was released in early March.
The 1.6.1 release is being coordinated by Kim Shepherd of The University of Waikato in New Zealand. A huge thanks goes out to Kim for helping to decrease the turnaround of this bug-fix release to the benefit of us all!
Additional information on 1.6.1 can be found on the 1.6.1 Release Notes page.
1.7.0
In keeping with the new decision to set a regular, timed release schedule, the DSpace Developers have scheduled DSpace 1.7.0 for release in December 2010. DSpace 1.7.0 will be the next major release of the software, promising new features and improvements to the platform.
Although the exact features have yet to be finalized, many potential features are listed on our new 1.7.0 Release Notes page, along with a tentative release schedule. The 1.7.0 feature list may change in the coming months and only those features fully completed by the cut-off date of Oct 22, 2010 will be included in the 1.7.0 release.
As DSpace 1.7.0 is our first scheduled, "time-based" release, it is likely that it will include fewer major features than 1.6.0. However, scheduling releases will benefit us all as it should decrease the delays in releasing new features, and increase the transparency of the development process. The DSpace Developers feel that these benefits will far outweigh the cost of having fewer major features in a given DSpace release. We hope the DSpace Community will also realize the immediate benefits, which should allow them to receive new features more quickly, rather than potentially waiting years for the next major release of the software.
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Google Summer of Code
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For the fourth year in a row, the DSpace community is participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. The global program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects, like DSpace.
The students accepted to this years DSpace GSoC 2010 may seem familiar, as we have two returning students, Andrius Blazinskas and Bojan Suzic, who will both be working further on integrating their previous projects into the next DSpace release.
Add Unit Testing to DSpace
DSpace currently lacks unit testing, which harms the development of the platform and makes easier to reintroduce past bugs while developing. This project is a proposal to add a set of unit test classes to DSpace, based on JUnit, plus some tools that detect issues in the code so we can improve its quality. (Student: Pere Villega)
Backport of DSpace 2 Storage Services API for DSpace 1.x
DSpace 2.0 storage mechanism provides convenient way to store DSpace contents in various storage solutions. It is based on set of interfaces for which various implementations are possible and some beta releases already exist (Jackrabbit, Fedora, etc). DSpace 2.0 is in its early stages of development and DSpace 1.x releases yet can not take advantage of this new mechanism. To fix this, it is necessary to port DSpace 2.0 storage interfaces to 1.x. I propose implementing this backport. (Student: Andrius Blazinskas)
DSpace REST API
Integration, testing, documentation and further development of DSpace REST services for 1.x and 2.0 versions. (Student: Bojan Suzic)
Storage Service Implementations Based on Semantic Content Repository
Develop DSpace storage service implementations based on semantic content repositories (TripleStore). (Student: Yigang Zhou)
GSoC Team Project Strategy:
This year the GSoC project strategy we be a bit different. We plan to pair mentor/student teams together where projects overlap. The goal is to assure that individual projects are aware of each other and solution sets are synergistic. We expect the students to assist one another in the process of vetting their work. To encourage this collaboration, we are exploring setting up a requirement that students participate in group IRC meetings in a manner that will challenge them to interact with both mentors and other students to evaluate each others work.
We also plan to use JIRA for each project. The students and mentors will work together to create tasks with time estimates that the student and other mentors can participate on. Likewise, we will use the wiki to manage all projects documentation. Finally, all projects will exist in the scm.dspace.org repository.
For more information about this year's GSoC DSpace projects, please click here.
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Open Repositories 2010 Planning Update
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Plans for the DSpace User Group Meeting, to be held in conjunction with the Open Repositories Conference 2010 in Madrid, Spain on July 6-9, 2010 are underway. All the submitted proposals have been reviewed by the planning committee, which is in the final stages of designing the program. In addition to a DuraSpace plenary session to provide a strategic overview of the organization as well as the roadmaps for both DSpace and Fedora, there will be presentations on the following topics: DSpace 1.6, Open Access, DSpace Repository Manager Workshop, Fedora Core Development, Workflow/Metadata, Preservation, Customization, Resource Discovery, Learning Resources, Research Management and Digital Media.
A detailed program schedule will be posted shortly on the OR10 website.
Many thanks to the OR2010 DSUG Planning Committee:
Elin Stangeland, Planning Committee Chair, University of Cambridge
Ben Boseman, @mire
Scott Phillips, Texas Digital Libraries
Leonie Hayes, University of Auckland
Sarah Shreeves, University of Illinois
Valorie Hollister, DuraSpace
To register for OR2010 and the DSUG meeting, please click here. For further information about the DSUG, please contact Elin Stangeland at es444[at]cam.ac.uk.
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| Conferences and Events |
May 7: Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS in Leeds, United Kingdom
May 10-11: Canadian ETD and Open Repositories Workshop in Ottawa Canada
May 25-26: Tectonics of Digital Curation: A Symposium on the Shifting Preservation and Access Landscape in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
June 5-13: Seventeenth International Conference (Crimea 2010) in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine
June 9: Seeing is Believing: New Technologies for Cultural Heritage in London, United Kingdom
June 16-18: ELPUB 2010 Publishing in the networked world: transforming the nature of communication in Helsinki, Finland
June 16-18: 13th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD2010) in Austin, Texas
June 21-25: JCDL 2010: Digital Libraries - 10 years past, 10 years forward, a 2020 Vision in Gold Coast, Australia
June 21-25: Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco, California
June 24-29: American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington D.C
June 29: 2010 SPARC Europe Annual Meeting in Aarhus, ???
June 29-July 2: 2010 LIBER Annual Conference in Aarhus, Denmark
July 1-2: The JISC/CNI Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland
July 6-9: Fifth Annual International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2010) in Madrid, Spain
August 6-8: Open Access to Science Information: Trends, Models and Strategies for Libraries in Chania, Crete, Greece
September 6-10: European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2010) in Glasgow, United Kingdom
October 18-24: Open Access Week 2010
November 8-9: SPARC Digital Repository Meeting in Baltimore, MD
December 6-8: 6th International Digital Curation Conference in Chicago, IL
December 13-14:Coalition for Networked Information Conference 2009 Fall Task Force Meeting in Washington, DC
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| Upcoming Training |
May 12: "Disaster Preparedness and Planning" an ALCTS Webinar presented by Nancy Kraft
May 14: "Communication Skills for Effective Advocacy" sponsored by the Repositories Support Group
May 19: "Perpetual Beta: IRs Then and Now" an ALCTS Webinar presented by Allison Sivac and Leah Vanderjagt
June 2-4: Repositories Support Project (RSP) Summer School 2010 in Cambridge, United Kingdom
June 9: "Disaster Response" an ALCTS Webinar presented by Nancy Kraft
June 13-18: Digital Preservation Management Five-Day Workshops in Cambridge, Massachusetts
July 26: "Open Access Publishing & Open Access Publishing Support: Transitioning from Subscriptions to Open Access" part of the ARL-ACRL ISC
August 18: "Continuity of Operations (COOP) after a Disaster" an ALCTS Webinar presented by Nancy Kraft
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