Ithaca, NY, Cambridge, MA The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a planning grant to the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons in support of their work to ensure durability and long-term access of scholarly research output and digital collections. This comes after the two largest providers of open source software for digital repositories announced their intentions to form a working collaboration in July of this year.

Over the next six months funding from the planning grant will allow the organizations to jointly specify and design “DuraSpace,” a new web-based service that will allow institutions to easily distribute content to multiple storage providers, both “cloud-based” and institution-based. The idea behind DuraSpace is to provide a trusted, value-added service layer to augment the capabilities of generic storage providers by making stored digital content more durable, manageable, accessible and sharable.

Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation, said, “Together we can leverage our expertise and open source value proposition to continue to provide integrated open solutions that support the scholarly mission of universities.”

Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, observes, “There is an important role for high-tech non-profit organizations in adding value to emerging cloud solutions. DuraSpace is designed with an eye towards enabling universities, libraries, and other types of organizations to take advantage of cloud storage while also addressing special requirements unique to areas such as digital archiving and scholarly communication.”

The grant from the Mellon Foundation will support a needs analysis, focus groups, technical design sessions, and meetings with potential commercial partners. A working web-based demonstration will be completed during the six-month grant period to help validate the technical and business assumptions behind DuraSpace.

In terms of how DuraSpace might evolve, Chuck Henry, Executive Director of the Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR), notes that “CLIR believes that DSpace/Fedora may offer some unique structures for knowledge organization and services that can enhance digital humanities scholarship, and those assumptions will be tested [with the grant work].”

About the DSpace Foundation

The DSpace Foundation (http://dspace.org/) was formed in 2007 to support to the growing global community of institutions using DSpace open source software to manage research output in a digital repository. DSpace was jointly developed in 2002 by Hewlett Packard and the MIT Libraries. Today, there are over more than 450 organizations worldwide a using the software to capture, preserve and share their artifacts, documents, collections and research data. To learn more about DSpace, please visit this introduction to DSpace.

About Fedora Commons

Fedora Commons (http://fedora-commons.org/) was established in 2007 as the permanent home of Fedora open source software—a robust, integrated repository system that enables storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content. Fedora has been adopted by hundreds of institutions worldwide as a platform for innovative applications supporting open-access publishing, scholarly communication, e-science, digital libraries, digital archives, education, and more. Fedora Commons helps bridge the worlds of content management, semantic technologies, and the Web. To find out about more about the Fedora community, please visit the Fedora Commons Community Registry.

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://www.mellon.org/), a not-for-profit corporation under the laws of the State of New York, was formed on June 30, 1969. At the heart of the Mellon Foundation’s grant making philosophy is a commitment to build, strengthen and sustain institutions and their core capacities in six core program areas: Higher Education and Scholarship, Scholarly Communications, Research in Information Technology, Museums and Art Conservation, Performing Arts and Conservation and the Environment.

For More Information

Contact: Sandy Payette, Executive Director, Fedora Commons, 607 255-2773, spayette@fedora-commons.org
Michele Kimpton, Executive Director, DSpace Foundation, 617 253-7746, michele@dspace.org