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dspace.org stats: 21,894 visits, 138 countries / territories, 68% new visitors - for February 2009
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 Volume 2, Issue 12
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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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Foundation Message
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For those of you that have not heard the news, I would like to applaud the MIT faculty for approving a university-wide initiative to provide free and open access to their scholarly articles on the web in MIT's DSpace repository. This is poised to have broad implications in the repository community, as in many cases repositories are an enabling technology for hosting this output. Let's hope MIT's example encourages others to be as bold in taking steps towards free and open access of research output. Click here to read the full press release from MIT.
OR2009 is coming up May 18-21 and I encourage everyone who can to attend this conference. This is the only conference focused on entirely on repositories and a great opportunity to get up to speed on all the new developments on the major platforms. Following the main conference there will be a one and a half day DSpace User Group Meeting which will have a number of informative and innovative presentations from the community. Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons and I will also talk about the Fedora/DSpace partnership and our new joint venture, DuraSpace. Brad McLean, DSpace Foundation's Technical Director, will discuss the roadmap for the platform, including 2.0. In addition, following the conference their will be a half day developer workshop on DSpace 1.5 and beyond, with specific focus on the new architecture of 2.0.
I would like to thank CILEA and Andrea Bollini for taking the role of release manager for 1.5.2. He has been doing an excellent job working with the development community to track down bug fixes and new features. He also is the first release manager to use Jira to manage and drive the release process. We thank him for taking on this challenge!
Michele Kimpton,
Executive Director of DSpace Foundation
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| Software Update |
1.5.2 Release: Andrea Bollini from CILEA has been coordinating the release of DSpace 1.5.2. A code freeze took place on March 23rd, and a testathon on March 25th. We are anticipating a release on or after April 6th, pending the resolution of remaining issues. 1.5.2 contains numerous bug fixes and feature improvements, including: SWORD 1.3 support, a new hook for statistics plugins, and UI translations for Greek, Italian and Thai. There is also an improvement for the item page in JSPUI which will allow many urn to be resolved graceful with only configuration work (DOI, ISSN, ISBN, etc.). In addition, Shibboleth support will also be integrated into 1.5.2.
The complete list of patches and issues can be found on the wiki, which includes links to see the current status in Jira.
Note that the hook for statistics plugins just provides a consistent API for retrieving usage events. There is additional work being done to utilize this hook for both University of Rochester statistics and for University of Minho statistics. These add-ons are expected to become available sometime after the 1.5.2 release.
2.0 Work: The 2.0 team is continuing to work on integrating XMLUI, new JSPUI, and a DSpace 1.5 compatible data model on top of the 2.0 framework. XMLUI has been updated to operate with Cocoon 2.2. Reviews of the 2.0 framework, the UIs, and the data model are being prepared for presentation at OR2009, as is a list of potential projects for future development. All of the current 2.0 code is available for review at Sourceforge. top |
| Google Summer of Code |
| The DSpace Foundation has been accepted as a participating organization for the Google Summer of Code program (GSoC). Members of the DSpace community are encouraged to review the existing project ideas or to create their own on the GSoC wiki. Student interns have until April 3, 2009 to apply GSoC website.
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Jira - Feature Request & Issue Tracking
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The DSpace community is now using Jira to track, prioritize and guide its work. In addition to 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. Jira also allows developers to create hierarchal tasks, vary the privilege levels and create a variety of status reports. 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.
You can get an overview of activity on DSpace 1.5.2 (and beyond) here without logging in. The "Roadmap" tab/link will give a good overview of issues sorted by their associated release. The "Open Issues" link will allow you to drill down, either by component (E.G. XMLUI), or by release, including issues not yet associated with any releases. You may also use the "Quick Search" box located at the upper right to enter keywords and locate issues.
Once you've located an issue of interest, and clicked on it, you will be presented with an overview page for that issue. Below the description is a tab bar; generally you'll want the "All" tab, as the others merely filter away sections.
If you create an account and log in, you will see additional options throughout the Jira. On the overview page you will be able to create new issues. On the issue status pages, a menu of operations will appear at the left, allowing you to comment, vote, and monitor the status of the issue.
The resolution of issues related to Shibboleth for DSpace 1.5.2 is an interesting example of Jira use. Please see http://jira.dspace.org/jira/browse/DS-109 and http://jira.dspace.org/jira/browse/DS-48 to get an idea of how the work has progressed. top
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Community Networking Survey
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| With the support and coordination of the DSpace Foundation, the DSpace Global Outreach Committee (DGOC) will release a DSpace community survey later this week. The goal of the survey is to provide information to the DSpace user community which will help to facilitate connections for organizations and individuals using the DSpace platform. The survey was designed by DGOC, which is made up of a group of DSpace users from around the world. The information gathered from the survey will be made available to the DSpace community in a dynamic database later this year. Members of the community will be able to search the database to find users who have similar repositories, environments or interests. Please take the time to complete the survey - not only will help you connect more easily with the rest of the DSpace community, but all respondents who complete the survey will be eligible for a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift certificate. If you did not receive an email with the survey link, please contact Valorie Hollister at
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DSpace User Group Meeting at OR2009
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The OR2009 DSpace User Group Meeting plans are underway. Eligible presentation proposals were submitted by March 20th and the DSUG Planning Committee is currently reviewing all proposals. Notification of acceptances will be sent out on April 3rd. More information, including a meeting schedule will be posted on the OR2009 website by late April.
The OR2009 DSUG Planning Committee includes:
Rea Devakos, University of Toronto and Planning Committee Chair
Andrea Bollini, AePIC Team CILEA
Valorie Hollister, DSpace Foundation
Elliot Metsger, Johns Hopkins University
Julie Speers, Georgia Institute of Technology
To register for OR2009 and the DSUG meeting, please click here. If you have any questions about the DSUG meeting, please contact Rea Devakos at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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| DSpace Global Outreach Committee Update |
The DSpace Global Outreach Committee is moving forward on several of their 2009 projects. Several members of the committee are helping to plan the DSpace User Group Meetings (DSUG) at OR2009 in May 2009 and DSUG stand alone meeting in Sweden in October 2009.
The committee is also designing and testing the new social network for the DSpace user community searchable by area of interest or expertise. They expect to have the new social network available at OR2009.
And lastly, as mentioned above, the DGOC has developed and released a community networking survey to help inform the DSpace user community and make all information available to the community through a dynamic database which can be queried and updated easily by users going forward.
The DGOC welcomes feedback and assistance at any time. You do not need to be a part of the DGOC to help with any of the above projects. If you would like to get involved in any way - big or small -- please contact Valorie Hollister at
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All About Repositories Webinars
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If you missed last month's "All About Repositories: DSpace and Fedora - A Collaboration Update" webinar, which included a discussion about DuraSpace, both the playback and presentation slides are available.
Click here to register for the next webinar in the "All About Repositories" series on April 15, "Increasing Use and Content Through Creative Service-Repository Bundling". The "All About Repositories" is a free series offered by a joint effort between DSpace Foundation, Fedora Commons, Sun Microsystems and The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). top |
| Conferences and Events |
April 1-3: 4th Institutional Repository Workshop hosted by the University of Pretoria, South Africa
April 6-7: CNI Spring 2009 Task Force Meeting includes presentation "DuraSpace: New Value from Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation" in Minneapolis, Minnesota
May 18-21: Open Repositories 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia
May 20-21: DSpace User Group Meeting held in conjunction with OR2009 in Atlanta, Georgia
June 1-3: Digital Repositories and DSpace User Community Meeting: an Information Services Camp event at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
June 10-12: 13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB 2009) in Milano, Italy
June 10-13: 12th International Symposium on Electronic Thesis and Dissertations in Pittsburgh, PA
June 17-19: OAI6 - CERN Workshop On Innovations In Scholarly Communication in Geneva, Switzerland
July 16-17: 4th International Conference on e-Learning in Toronto, Canada
September 27-October 2: 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2009) in Corfu, Greece
October 14-16: DSpace User Group Meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden
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