Page History

Tim McGeary

"I am honored to be nominated as a candidate for Board-Member-at-Large for the DuraSpace Foundation.  Over my nearly 15 year career in higher education, I have found the DuraSpace Foundation, its services, and its administrative support of open source projects to be at the highest level of quality. It has been a privilege to partner with DuraSpace staff and members at each of the three institutions where I have worked.  The collaborative spirit and commitment to sustainable and open solutions at DuraSpace is precisely the right type of focus and leadership, as well as the foundation for my leadership as Associate University Librarian at Duke University.  I would be honored to work with the DuraSpace Foundation Board of Directors and new CEO Debra Hanken Kurtz to set strategic directions and priorities necessary to continue and enhance our commitment to excellence, openness, and sustainability."  

David W. Lewis

Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Dean of the IUPUI University Library
IU Assistant Vice President for Digital Scholarly Communication

My library is a long time user of DSpace and one of our programmers is a DSpace committer.  I have been a member of the DSpace Steering Committee and am currently the committee’s chair.  I think DuraSpace will face several challenges in the next several years.  First, while there are some European members, DuraSpace needs to expand its reach beyond North America, both in terms of memberships/funding and engagement with projects.  This will be important in the near term for the DSpace, but the other projects will likely follow DSpace in this regard.  Second, Fedora and DSpace are at some level competitive.  DuraSpace needs to balance the two projects or develop a strategy that provides each a place.  If Hydra becomes a DuraSpace project this may become more complex.  Finally, while DuraSpace has made the transition to a membership-supported organization it is not clear that all of the projects have the support they need for long-term viability.

Brian is a leader in the digital library community and his experience and expertise will prove invaluable to DuraSpace and its community as we work with SHARE, DPN, and others in the ecosystem to provide open access, curation, and preservation of cultural heritage and research outputs of all types.

Brian has served on similar committees to guide and facilitate work in digital libraries and archives for the state of California. Most recently, he has served on the California Digital Library Review Steering Committee and as the Senior Associate to the University Librarian of the CDL, with responsibilities for development and deployment of primary digital content with an emphasis on the Online Archive of California. At UCSD he has served on a number of committees tasked with technology infrastructure planning including the Research Cyberinfrastructure Oversight Committee, Cyberinfrastructure Planning and Operations Committee, and the Cyberinfrastructure Group.

In addition to extensive experience planning and guiding infrastructure development in the state of California, he has administered and served as the primary investigator on several large grants from Mellon, NSF, the Library of Congress, NARA, the Luce Foundation, and Californian State Library.

He is a leader among his peers in ARL. His experience both planning and funding work in support of digital libraries and archives and his reputation as a collaborator make him the ideal candidate for this position.

Here Brian expresses in his own words, his interest in the member at large position on the board:

The UC San Diego Library has been involved with DuraSpace projects for many years now. We started with Chronopolis as a DuraCloud option, progressing to actively contributing technical leadership and software development to Fedora, and more recently supporting the move of Hydra to DuraSpace for legal support. We have also contributed financially since 2011/12, increasing our membership steadily to the Gold Member level.

Above all, UCSD values the DuraSpace commitment to solutions that are driven by our community. The various options and service offerings you’ve helped develop and make available are impressive. Now that they are maturing, it is probably time to give priority to developing a clear strategy (or strategies) for aligning/integrating those offerings more seamlessly—and not just, or even primarily, technically.

Salwa Ismail

Innovative, Advocate, Inquisitive, are the three words I would use to describe my approach to my profession as an academic librarian. I truly believe that libraries have moved beyond their role of facilitators of information to creators and curators of information. As universities evolve to become the universities of the future, so do libraries and the services and tools we provide. I subscribe to the school of thought that we need to be innovative and creative but within the realm of sustainability and DuraSpace’s mission of providing open sourced innovative technologies with community support addresses just that. My library has been members of DuraSpace for a few years now and we’re very robust users of DSpace, my team contributed to some of the base code for DSpace 4 and 5.  It allows for free sharing and transparent exchange of ideas and resources among peers.  One of the current priorities that I feel DuraSpace should be focusing on is leveraging the existing services, plans and designs from preservation networks such as DPN, APtrust and with the new DuraSpace preservation plans with archivesDirect. I’m an advocate that we need community supported technologies to create services to help ensure that current and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage, and DuraSpace’s mission of just that speaks to the core if this

I am the Digital Assets Librarian at York University. I oversee the development of data curation, asset management and preservation initiatives, along with creating and implementing systems that support the capture, description, delivery, and preservation of digital objects having significant content of enduring values. I'm also active in the Islandora community, serving as the Release Manager, Project Director for the Islandora/Fedora 4 integration project, member of the Islandora Foundation's Roadmap Committee, and contribute code to the project. I also work with the Fedora and Hydra communities where collective work overlaps and is of benefit to all three communities.

I have dedicated my career to making digital preservation a priority by helping to create a better understanding of the digital environment. Using methods that promote best practices in digital preservation, open access and open source software, my goal is to preserve material that would otherwise be largely inaccessible to researchers, and to create opportunities for these researchers to access, experience, and interact with digital objects in order to support and advance disciplinary scholarship. Additionally, I contribute to the ongoing construction, development, and improvement of digital library systems created by the library community. I undertake this work because I believe that as our national documentary heritage becomes increasingly threatened by political and institutional forces and by a shortage of skills, knowledge, and funding, the library community must continue to forcefully take up the challenge of digital stewardship, and build systems and mechanisms to ensure that valuable historic and cultural materials are preserved and made universally accessible.

My involvement with all aspects of an active open source communities like Islandora, Hydra, and Fedora have increased my interest in the governance models for open source projects, and how organizations like DuraSpace can contribute to the development of a successful open source ecosystem.