Dear Friends,
As we look forward to progress and new initiatives across our community in the new year I want to take this opportunity to brief members on what I see as key DuraSpace strategic priorities for 2019.
Leaders from across the ecosystem of open source software projects that support the preservation and access of digital collections came together in December at the University of Michigan at the first meeting of Open Community Infrastructure to discuss bringing more coherence to separate communities and projects in order to address a variety of redundancies and inefficiencies. The following institutions were represented: University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Northwestern University, Indiana University, University of Colorado, North Carolina State University, Penn State University, Ohio State University, New York University, Stanford University, Columbia University, University of Iowa, Emory University, University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University. The group looked carefully at the feasibility of a coherence model for a focused set of open source software projects that we collectively use for digital preservation and access, and to consider what it might take to move the ideal of coherence and interdependence into action. There will be a report issued on the proceedings in February.
In light of our community's recognition of the need for organizational coherence DuraSpace is planning for:
- how to amplify our voice to a larger member base around the world in 2019;
- providing access to staff and investment dollars that will accelerate our work and build our momentum;
- improving benefits to members that will strengthen our products and services;
- increased opportunities for product integration that will bolster our OSS products as viable end-to-end solutions and alternatives to proprietary products;
- providing more flexible support to OSS/community-supported projects/programs based on need and revenue
Thank you for your continued support of our work on these and other initiatives aimed at providing enduring access to the world’s digital heritage.
Warm regards,
Erin Tripp
Executive Director
A Members-Only Hot Topics Webinar
On Wednesday, December 5th at 12:00 p.m. EST, our Hot Topics Series, "The Revolution Will Be Open?" will conclude. Members are invited to register for, "How For-Profit Companies Can Be a Part of the Open Environment.” In this webinar, we'll explore how for-profit business models can be compatible while participating in the Open Access revolution. Please join us to hear from Brian Hole, Ubiquity; Andrew Smeal, Hindawi, and Anita Bandrowski, SciCrunch as they discuss their organizations' roles in the world of open scholarly infrastructure and how their work can benefit the scholarly communication community while both keeping open the infrastructure that they provide and operating in a for-profit mode. Register today! A special thanks to David Lewis and Michael Roy the curators of this series and to all of the webinar series presenters and participants. The recordings and presentation slides of this series are available at https://duraspace.org/webinar/.
Country-specific Webinar
On November 14th there was the second webinar specifically dedicated to the Brazilian DSpace community. With the support of NEKI IT, a Certified DSpace Contributor, the webinar offered the opportunity to the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul to present LUME, the digital repository they developed to allow access to their digital collections of materials. The webinar was very well attended, with over 35 attendees discussing with LUME's team their approach in implementing repository functionalities, and the lessons learned. Additional information about the webinar, slides and recording can be found on the official DSpace Brazilian User Group WIKI pages.
Where We'll Be (please update with upcoming engagements through Dec.)
- SWIB, Bonn, Germany, Nov. 26-28 - David
- CNI, Washington, DC, Dec. 10-11 - Erin, David
- First Indian DSpace User Group Meeting, New Delhi (India), Dec 3-4 - Erin (remote participation)
