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As spring warms up there are several exciting initiatives underway at DuraSpace.
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 initiative is coupled with the strategic suggestion from our community that we position the value of our organization “higher” in the scholarly ecosystem 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.
Welcome! This month we extend a warm welcome to Erin Tripp, our new Business Development Manager who will join us on May 1, and Michele Mennielli, who will serve as our International Membership and Partnership Manager beginning on July 1.
Erin has a tremendous breadth and depth of experience with community-supported open source repository software, coupled with strong communications and interpersonal skills. She is creative, thoughtful, and direct, all qualities necessary to succeed developing and fostering new community efforts. Michele has worked with DuraSpace on many DSpace-related marketing initiatives targeted at greater International engagement. He is seen as a leader in the community with a large global network and a proven track record community building. We are thrilled to have them on board!
Michele ------------
Warm regards,
Debra Hanken Kurtz
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Representatives of the Fedora membership focused on topics relating to sustainability, with the working definition of, "sustained financial support and stakeholder engagement for ongoing innovation". It was recognized that financial health should come from a diversification of project revenue streams, while engagement and innovation opportunities rest with deeper alignment and coordination with adjacent projects, such as Islandora and Hydra. Notions of software sustainability were discussed in the context of an official policy of support for critical patches to previous major releases and formalized, production-scale release testing infrastructure.
VIVO
VIVO members reviewed the mission and vision statements keeping in mind that VIVO now offers institutions a new ability to present an integrated view of institutional scholarship. The group discussed terms and ideas around the mission and vision statements that could create a more expanive view of the project. Comments and questions on the draft 2017-2018 Strategic plan being developed by the VIVO Steering Group were also discussed and clarified. The main points include how VIVO can gain mindshare, what features are critical for adoption, how can those features be developed, who are VIVO's natural partners, how can VIVO become the obvious choice for representing and using scholarship data, and could VIVO serve as a front-end for repositories?
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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