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DSpace Sponsorship Program Update |
In order to sustain the efforts of the DSpace Foundation, a sponsorship program was launched a few months ago, as one component of the DSpace Foundation fundraising initiatives. To date there have been over twenty organizations which have made commitments to be sponsors. You can find the current sponsor list on our website. For those organizations that have already contributed, we thank you for your support.
If you are not familiar with the program and would like to become a sponsor, please view the materials on our website. Funds from the sponsorship program will directly support the work of the Foundation as it relates to, 1) the development of the software platform, 2) the deployment of tools and infrastructure to better coordinate input and process (like the use of Jira, the issue/feature tracking system), and 3) the continued communication with the community (newsletter, meetings, trainings, website content, etc.). If you have any questions regarding the sponsorship program, please do not hesitate to contact Michele Kimpton.
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DSpace/Fedora Collaboration |
DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons have been working closely together over the last month to kick off plans to develop DuraSpace. DuraSpace is a potential service that would provide trusted and reliable asset management in the cloud. The organizations received a joint planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the concept over the next six months. Both teams have been meeting jointly with service providers, members of our community, and other interested parties that are managing cultural heritage material to analyze the need, business model, technical feasability and use cases. There will be a joint web cast on DuraSpace in the early part of next year. For more information on ongoing efforts and projects please visit the collaboration's wiki.
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Maintenance Support Services
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Based on support expertise, acquired in different repository projects over the last years, @mire launched a set of services for Operational Repositories.
It has always been an important trend in the community that institutions develop and maintain their own modifications to the existing DSpace source code. Local development is an important innovation driver for DSpace, and good modifications often make it to the core release. Unfortunately, local developers are often required to spend their time in maintenance or operational support.
By teaming up with @mire, local developers and institutional repository managers can successfully outsource the bulk of maintenance and operational support, allowing them to allocate their own time to their core responsibilities.
@mire's maintenance services are split up into monitoring and resolving. Both on the hardware and software level, careful monitoring can be a pro-active way to identify possible issues, before they cause errors visible to end users.
After issues are raised by the agent responsible for monitoring (this can be either @mire, or institution staff), @mire's repository engineers will start analyzing and resolving the situation.
@mire's support services contains both Technical Support and User Help desk options. Timely response to the problems users, in-house administrators or managers are confronted with helps to keep them enthusiastic about the repository project. Whether these questions concern the administrator interface, the repository's infrastructure, or any other part of the system, @mire has the expertise to provide swift and correct answers. For more information visit @mire's website.
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Jira - Issue/Feature Tracker
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The DSpace community is now using Jira to track, prioritize and guide its work. In addition to managing the DSpace platform work, Jira also allows the community to watch specific issues, receive updates when there are changes, as well as vote on an issue's relevance. Although there are no guarantees when a specific item will be addressed, the community can build a consensus on items captured in Jira and it will enhance the visibility of that issue. Community members are encouraged to create Jira accounts, comment on issues and participate in the steering process. Jira participants can also subscribe to feeds, if they are interested in tracking activity. |
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Update on 1.5.2
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The DSpace Foundation is soliciting interest in a DSpace 1.5.2 release, tentatively slated for February 2009. Tracking patches, bugs, and feature requests for this release will soon begin in the DSpace 1.5 section of the DSpace Jira. Work to review the existing patch queue on SourceForge for inclusion will begin shortly. If you are an interested party in a DSpace 1.5 patch or feature, you're encouraged to begin using the Jira to track and vote on items. |
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Update on 2.0
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The foundation of DSpace 2.0 development consists of a kernel/service framework and a set of core service interfaces. The service framework for 2.0 has been completed and are based on Spring and Guice, and will permit services to be written in either paradigm. This framework provides the structure for future extensions and customizations of DSpace either as modifications to the core services, replacement services or as new ones.
The core services interfaces also have concrete implementations providing the basic DSpace 2.0 functionality. The Configuration, User, Event, Request, Session, and SimpleStorage services have initial implementations available. Work on the Search, License, and Repository service interfaces and implementations is in progress.
Sitting on top of the framework and core services are the DSpace 2.0 applications.
Work to port the JSPUI and XMLUI applications to the 2.0 core is underway, and initial versions should begin to be available in January. Customization via modifications to the user interfaces will continue to be possible.
The DSpace 2.0 work can be followed on the wiki and on the DSpace Jira, where you can submit issues and vote on their priority. The DSpace 2.0 core can be downloaded from sourceforge today. A release of 2.0 with user interfaces is forthcoming in early 2009. |
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DSpace Reaches 500 Instances
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The DSpace platform now has over 500 instances in 60 different countries worldwide. DSpace continues to be the most popular repository solution, with over a third of the known repositories using the DSpace software. Users represent a diverse group of institutions; academic institutions, research centers, museums, non-profits, consortiums, medical centers/hospitals, national libraries and governments. DSpace is used to store a wide variety of information; student/faculty output, learning resources, history/art archives, community/cultural preservation, research and government documents. Each month there are between 10-15 new instances of DSpace. The new ones -- 24 of them this month -- are listed on the left-hand side of this newsletter. Check out the full list of "Who's Using DSpace" on the website. If your instance isn't on the list, please register your URL with us - we'd love to include you in our growing community.
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DSpace Global Outreach Committee |
The DSpace Global Outreach Committee is currently finalizing their plans and a list of specific projects for 2009. The list includes helping to organize the DSpace User Group Meetings next year (OR2009 in Georgia in May and DSUG Meeting in October in Sweden), developing a variety of helpful tools/resources for the DSpace user community, and identifying ways to encourage improved networking/communication among members of the community. A specific list of projects will be placed on the group's wiki shortly.
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DSpace Repository Manager Meeting |
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