Attending: Armand Doucette, Tim Donohue, Lieven Droogmans, Salwa Ismail, Richard Jizba, David Lewis, Jonathan Markow, Michele Mennielli, Ingrid Parent, Kristi Park, Jaime Schumacher, Maureen Walsh

Minutes:  David Lewis 

Agenda:

Notes

1. There was a discussion of whether getting t-shirts for OR16 was a good investment given the tight fiscal situation for the projects.  It was decided it was not, but that some other cheaper give-away such as stickers suitable for laptops would be good.
2. Tim reviewed the current situation with the new user interface.  A prototype using the JavaScript framework Angular 2 is being developed by @mire, Cineca, Texas A&M, and Tim.  The prototype will be used to test Google Scholar compatibility.  This should be complete and tested by mid May.  It this works, other functionality will be added to the prototype.  The UI developer group should be able to make a recommendation to the Steering Group for a decision at its June 1 meeting and the decision can be announced at OR16.  There was an initial conversation about how to engage the developer community in developing the UI.  The hope would be to have a strategy for doing so ready to roll out at OR16.
3. Jonathan and Tim reviewed the plans for OR16.  A number of DSpace panels are on the program.  The “State of DSpace” panel will involve members of the Steering Group and will need to be organized.
4. Jonathan reported for Debra on the Lyrasis merger.  There was a good conversation at the DuraSpace Summit.  The due diligence process is still underway Robert Miller, Debra, and Michele Kimpton are working on details.  The earliest a merger could be realized is July 2017.  Ways are being explored to get the broadest range of input.  There will be a meeting for service providers at OR16.
5. Membership Drive – E-mails to prospective members will go out next week.  There will be two strategies for pursuing new members – one for North America and one for the rest of the world, initially focus primarily on Europe.  David and Debra will focus on North America.  Jonathan and Michele will focus of Europe.  The initially effort in Europe will be to connect with organizations whose members benefit from DSpace, for example EuroCRIS, CORE, or Libre.
6. There was an initial conversation about how DSpace and DSpaceCRIS (supported by Cineca) might be developed in a more complimentary way so that DSpaceCRIS becomes an extension of DSpace.  This would likely be attractive to a number of national level projects.  It was noted that CRIS were generally produced by large for-profit publishers and that DSpaceCRIS is the only open source CIRS available.  To make this possible DSpace would need to adopt the DSpaceCRIS data model or developing a new data model cooperatively.  Cineca is supportive of moving in this direction.  Developing in this direction was generally viewed as a good potential path and it is clearly worthy of continued conversation.  It was agreed that the conversation with the broader community would begin at OR16.