Member Newsletter, outline/content, February 2017

DuraSpace Membership Newsletter
February 20

MESSAGE FROM THE CEO

This month we take an exciting step towards focusing our efforts to expand collaborations with academic, scientific, cultural, technology, and research communities in support of projects and services to help ensure that current and future generations will have access to our collective digital heritage. The DuraSpace organization seeks a Business Development Manager to cultivate and deepen those relationships and partnerships with international organizations and consortia to elevate the organization’s profile and to expand the services it offers. If you know of someone who would be well-suited to join our dynamic team please point them to the full job description here. Inquires may be sent to me at <dkurtz@duraspace.org>.

We are also working steadily with our Hydra-In-A-Box partners at DPLA and Stanford to release the Hyku repository minimum viable product, a HykuDirect hosted service pilot program, and a higher-performing aggregation system at DPLA this spring. Recently we welcomed Michael Della Bitta, Heather Greer Klein, and Kelcy Shepherd to the Hydra-In-A-Box team. Read about their deep experience, unique skills, and genuine enthusiasm here. Stay tuned for more information by signing up to receive the bi-monthly Hydra-In-A-Box Update here.

Do you have a few minutes–less than five? We would very much appreciate capturing your ideas about how we can be of greater service to our community through this brief 4-question survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Z6ZDN7X. Thank you in advance!

Warm regards,

Debra Hanken Kurtz

CEO

YOU'RE INVITED

Introducing DSpace 7: Next Generation UI

DuraSpace is pleased to announce the latest DuraSpace Hot Topics Webinar Series, "Introducing DSpace 7: Next Generation UI". The series is curated by Claire Knowles, Library Digital Development Manager at the University of Edinburgh and will provide a comprehensive overview of DSpace 7 development. More information here–Register today!

DURASPACE MEMBER SUMMIT

 DuraSpace Member Summit, April 4-5, 2017

The 2017 DuraSpace Member Summit will be held on April 3-4 directly following the CNI Spring 2017 Meeting at the Hyatt Regency in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Be sure and book your hotel room soon!

PROJECTS

FEDORA

Fedora 4.7.1 Released; Content In and Out; Fedora at the University of Alberta,

This month the Fedora team released Fedora 4.7.1–now available. This is a backwards compatible refinement of the previous release, focused on improvements and bug fixes to the REST-API and the core code base.

One of the design goals of Fedora is to simplify the process of getting resources into and out of Fedora in a standardized way. This enables the reuse of Fedora resources in other contexts, such as exporting to a separate preservation system, as well as provides a pathway for migrating across Fedora installations, such as migrating from a LevelDB backend to PostgreSQL. Due to a significant level of community interest in this functionality the third import/export sprint towards developing related tooling was completed in December. Stakeholders have had an opportunity to test the new functionality and provide feedback. If you would like to try out the utility please check out the README file for instructions.

A recent blog post, "Telling Fedora 4 Stories at the University of Alberta with Geoff Harder, Peter Binkley, and Leah Vanderjagt" explains how Fedora was able to help meet strategic institutional goals at U of A:

"We take our role as long-term stewards of digital resources seriously. We had a goal of developing a very feature-rich, flexible institutional repository, and building our own front end on top of Fedora’s strong foundation enabled us to do that quite quickly. We have been able to respond nimbly to user requests for changes and new features, which helped us promote the repository as a useful and valuable service. Because others in the Fedora community share our goals we do not have to negotiate a lot of changes to a big code base. Because our DAMS strategy sits around Fedora we are able to provide flexible support to our user community." Read more here.

DSPACE

Join DSpace 7 Efforts–Sign Up for DSpace Slack

DSpace tech lead for DuraSpace Tim Donohue says, "Much remains to be done to have an alpha version of DSpace 7 available for testing in 2017. Stay tuned for broad calls for participation in DSpace 7 development." To join day-to-day conversations please join a new slack dedicated to DSpace 7 development–sign up here. To receive DSpace 7 updates subscribe to the DSpace mailing list updates and follow DSpacetweets on twitter. Read more here.

The DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) met recently to discuss and review COAR user stories that outline priority functionalities for next generation repositories. Notes may be found here.

The DSpace 7 UI Outreach Group is working on streamlining communications and outreach tools and tactics focusing on the need for multi-lingual communications to DSpace users in many parts of the world. In support of DSpace 7 technical development the group is reviewing search and browse use cases. if you are interested in joining discussions on Feb, 22 at 12:00 PM ET; UTC 17:00 please contact Carol Minton Morris <cmmorris@duraspace.org>.

VIVO

VIVO 1.9.2 Available, VIVO Camp Registration Deadline Feb 24, Microsoft Academic, Submit Your VIVO17 Proposal

VIVO 1.9.2 was released earlier this month. This is a minor release that addresses an ORCID integration issue, and a problem with creating new items.

Are considering attending VIVO Camp in Albuquerque, Ap 6-8 immediately following CNI and the DuraSpace Summit? Registration ends on Feb 24–reserve your spot now

Could Microsoft Academic be a new data source for VIVO?  We are always looking for new data sources for VIVO–Microsoft Academic has an open API and documentation encouraging reuse of the data they have assembled.  Their API meets several important criteria for VIVO:  1) It is "open" – you can make open queries up to some limits and then pay fees for higher volume.  2) It identifies works, people and institutions using its own internally consistent keys, 3) Given information about a person, or a collection of people, it can find publications that have a high probability of being authored by those people.  You may want to take a look at http://academic.microsoft.com  At the present time it is difficult to determine what fees might apply for use of the API in particular institution settings.  

Mark your calendars–abstracts for presentations, workshops, posters and demos for the 8th Annual VIVO Conference are due by March 26, 2017!

SERVICES

We are pleased to welcome new DSpaceDirect customers International Development Research Centre, Centenary University, and Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth. We also welcome new DuraCloud customer Georgia College.

ArchivesDirect, DSpaceDirect, and DuraCloud services from DuraSpace are built on solid open source software platforms and require very little effort to start up. DuraSpace staff experts work directly with service customers to provide personalized on-boarding processes and superb customer support. Our services can provide open access to institutional resources, preservation of treasured collections, and simplified data management tools. Contact customersupport@duraspace.org to learn more about any of the web services DuraSpace offers.