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- Thank you to our members who traveled to Albuquerque earlier this month to share ideas for improving DSpace, Fedora, and VIVO at the DuraSpace Summit (see report below).
- The 2017 Membership Campaign is underway with the aim of deeply engaging members from all over the world in working together to provide enduring access to the world’s digital heritage.
- One web site We have started work on combining our project and services web sites into a single DuraSpace web site. Based on our Summit discussions and previous strategic evaluation DuraSpace is headed in the direction of integrating mindshare, resources, and efforts across technologies where possible. This effort is coupled with the strategic suggestion from our community that we position the value of our organization “higher” in the scholarly ecosystem food chain to more fully align our mission with the objectives of our partners, collaborators, and customers. In addition we have had appeals from international groups to define more clearly nuances in our tools and services and to promote the DuraSpace organization as a whole as the "go-to group" for our suite of open source technologies and hosted services. A unified web presence is step towards this goal.
- other? (From Val: should we highlight the new hires? I know it is mentioned below, but this is big news)
Warm regards,
Debra Hanken Kurtz
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She reported that for the 12 months ending in December revenue grew 14% or $250,000 over the prior year. Particularly notable was the $132k growth over prior year for cloud services. Organizational expenses increased by less than 2% or $37,000. (From Val: Should we link to a copy of the slide deck for all speakers?)
Two new staff members will join DuraSpace in 2017. Erin Tripp, who is currently the Business Development Manager at discoverygarden inc. will take on the role of Business Development Manager for DuraSpace on May 1. Michele Mennielli will become the new International Membership and Partnership Manager for DuraSpace this summer. Mr. Mennielli serves on the DSpace Steering Group, the euroCRIS Board and is currently the head of International Business Development at 4Science. He was formerly head of International Business Development for CINECA.
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How to provide greater value to our communities through added services, consulting, and exploratory work
How to engage beyond Canada and the US
What organizations other than the five identified in the strategic plan should we approach and how will we forge strategic partnerships with them?
(From Val: Should we include a very brief summary of some of the feedback?)
DSpace, Fedora and VIVO project leaders spent the remainder of the day working on project-specific questions, marketing strategies, policies and related tasks.
(From Val: Have each of the projects written a brief report/summary of these discussions?)
Robert Cartolano, DuraSpace Board member and Associate Vice President, Digital Programs and Technology Services at Columbia University Libraries/Information Services offered closing DuraSpace Summit remarks by reminding the audience that DuraSpace is thriving, and moving towards integrated knowledge infrastructure solutions based on feedback from their valued members.
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