EDUCAUSE, Nov. 3-6, 2009, Denver, CO–Michele Kimpton and Carol Minton Morris will be at the Sun booth and at a cocktail party with DuraSpace, JA-SIG, Kuali, Sakai (hope to see you there!). A press briefing is scheduled for Tuesday November 3, from 3:00-4:00 at the Hyatt Hotel that will highlight higher education community source projects:

•    Introduction and Next Steps – Brad Wheeler and Chris Coppola
•    Kuali Update – Colorado State, San Joaquin Delta
•    DuraSpace Update – Michele Kimpton, University of Virginia
•    Sakai Update – Marist College, UC Davis

SWITCH and “Digital Archivists Unite-DARCUNITE” event, Nov. 9, 2009, Zurich, Switzerland–Thorny Staples will be speaking with Swiss users about Fedora Commons and DuraSpace. http://www.switch.ch/collection/event/09fedora/index.html.

Digital Library Federation (DLF) Fall Forum, Nov. 11-13, 2009, Long Beach, CA–Sandy Payette and Brad McLean will be on hand. Brad will join Josh Greenberg and Jenn Riley for a panel session entitled “Innovation: Technology.” http://www.diglib.org/forums/fall2009/2009fallschedule.htm

Boulder, CO, Washington, DC The association for information technology (IT) in higher education, announced the release of the Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report. It summarizes findings from the 2008 EDUCAUSE Core Data Service survey, in which nearly 930 colleges and universities provided detailed information about their IT environments and practices in fiscal year 2008.

EDUCAUSE made significant changes in the report format to make the material more useful and accessible. Many tables have been replaced by charts and graphs so the reader can see patterns or make visual comparisons. The report now addresses trends in the data from 2004 to 2008. And rather than reporting means and medians for variables with highly skewed distributions, the 2008 report presents medians and, in some cases quartiles, to provide a more accurate picture of the data.

Key findings include:

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND LEADERSHIP
• In all institutional classes except community colleges, the IT leader reports to the senior executive officer (e.g., president or chancellor) or the highest academic officer at the majority of institutions (60% or more).
• At community colleges, IT leaders are even more likely to report to the highest officer or highest administrative officer (almost 70%).
• The percentages on IT leader reporting relationships have been fairly stable over the last five years across most institutional types.
• The median ratio of student FTE to IT staff FTE is between 100- and 150-to-1 across most institutional categories, with community colleges having the highest ratio at roughly 200-to-1 and liberal arts institutions the lowest at 75-to-1.

IT FINANCING AND MANAGEMENT
• Adjusting for inflation, all classes of institutions generally saw centralized IT funding increase from 2004 to 2008, but it appears that this increase only kept pace with enrollment (and inflation). Median IT dollars spent per FTE student stayed relatively flat across institutional categories (adjusted for inflation).
• In 2008, centralized IT funding as a percentage of total campus expenditures varied from a low of 4% at doctoral-extensive universities and general baccalaureate institutions to a high of 7% at community colleges.
• Trends in median compensation (including benefits) for IT staff per FTE, when adjusted for inflation, remained fairly flat over the last five years.
• For 2008, approximately 70% of institutions reported using external suppliers for at least one IT function, reflecting a steady increase since 2004.

FACULTY AND STUDENT COMPUTING
• Respondents reported that only 2–6% of institutions offered 24 x 7 help desks in 2008, except for the 20% of doctoral institutions with them; there are slight upward trends in this area in all classes over the last five years, though.
• Because many students rely on personal e-mail accounts, some campuses have stopped issuing institutional student e-mail addresses or are considering it. In 2004, only 1-2% of campuses considered this, but by 2008 nearly 10% of associate’s, baccalaureate, and master’s institutions and 25% of doctoral institutions were thinking about doing so.
• About two-thirds of campuses say they provide “intensive support” for faculty who are heavy technology users, including “opportunities for users to share experiences” (70-90% of institutions, depending on type), seminars (80-90%+ of campuses), and training on request (almost all campuses).
• To address unauthorized file sharing, some institutions offer students a campus-negotiated service for online music and movies. From 2004 to 2007, there was some increase across all classes of institutions in the percentage offering such a service, but sharp decreases from 2007 to 2008. In 2008, only 2% of community colleges, about 10% of baccalaureate and master’s institutions, and 25% of doctoral institutions offered this service.

NETWORKING AND SECURITY
• Relatively few institutions across most categories have bandwidth to the commodity Internet of 200 Mbps or better (about 25% of master’s and 10% of baccalaureate and associate’s).
• In contrast, most doctoral institutions report bandwidth to the commodity Internet of 200 Mbps or better and nearly 40% report connections of 1 Gbps-plus.
• Most campuses do track and/or shape bandwidth, for example, to limit the impact of large file downloads on their networks. The percentage that does not is less than 5% of doctoral, master’s, and baccalaureate institutions and about 10% of community colleges.
• About 70% of all campuses reported having conducted a campus IT security risk assessment, and the trend toward campuses conducting such assessments generally increased across each institutional category from 2004 to 2008.

INFORMATION SYSTEMS
• Institutions use many strategies to acquire information systems. In 2008, open-source applications were definitely in that mix, with 70% of doctoral institutions, 67% of baccalaureate institutions, 54% of master’s institutions, and 39% of community colleges reporting use of an open-source product (in most cases, a course management system), with or without customization.
• Purchasing a commercial product and implementing it with or without customization was the primary means of meeting information system needs in 2008, with rates ranging 72-88% across institutional categories.
• The percentage of institutions reporting that they had outsourced at least some of their information systems needs generally increased over the last five years, approaching or exceeding 20% of institutions in each category in 2008.
• Over the last five years, the use of homegrown systems declined for all institutions and for all system types surveyed, except library information systems, which have not had a history of homegrown development. Homegrown systems are still used most often for grants management, while homegrown course management systems seem to be disappearing.

To learn more about the Core Data Service and the benefits it offers to participating institutions, visit: http://www.educause.edu/coredata

Access the complete EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report
at: http://net.educause.edu/coredata/reports/2008/index.asp

About EDUCAUSE
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association and the foremost community of IT leaders and professionals committed to advancing higher education. EDUCAUSE programs and services are focused on analysis, advocacy, community building, professional development, and knowledge creation because IT plays a transformative role in higher education. EDUCAUSE supports those who lead, manage, and use information technology through a comprehensive range of resources and activities. For more information, visit http://www.educause.edu.

Kai is a Software Engineer with FIZ Karlsruhe, and has been a member of the eSciDoc (https://www.escidoc.org/) Team since early 2008. His current roles include performance and scalability, eSciDoc core framework, development and other eSciDoc and Fedora-related projects.

Non-profit organizations dedicated to open source development depend on community contributions both from individuals and the organizations that support them. The willingness of skilled community members like Kai Stnad and others to participate in the overall direction and details of delivering an integrated platform upgrade is appreciated by all who benefit from the improvements. Eric S. Raymond, a long-time open source analyst, observed in his 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” that programmers who freely share their code drive Internet culture and innovation because their contributions allow open source software to undergo constant improvement by users and developers.

About FIZ Karlsruhe

FIZ Karlsruhe (http://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de/) is a non-profit service institution for research whose task is to make sci-tech information published all over the world available to the public and to provide related services. As an international service partner to science and research, FIZ Karlsruhe provides expertise in handling all issues related to information transfer and knowledge management required for research and development. The FIZ Karlsruhe mission is to support and promote science by offering innovative information services. FIZ Karlsruhe is a member institute of the Leibniz Association (WGL).

For more information about how to participate in the release of Fedora Repository 3.3 please visit: http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCREPO/Fedora+3.3+-+Call+for+Participation.

A full text of the release is below or you may visit https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5212.html.

October 23, 2009
OTTAWA/GHENT, BELGIUM - On October 21, CARL became a founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). COAR is an international association of organizations that have a common strategic interest in open access to scholarly communication. COAR was formed out of a need to work together at the international level to promote greater visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of open access digital repositories.

Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has played a leadership role in the development of open access repositories in Canada. Through the CARL Institutional Repositories Program, the Association has assisted its members in setting up repositories on their campuses; and worked with other research organizations in Canada and internationally in support of open access. Participation in COAR is a natural extension of these activities. “We are delighted to announce our membership in COAR,” said Tom Hickerson, chair of the CARL Institutional Repositories Working Group and Vice-President/President-Elect of CARL. “COAR membership offers CARL and Canadian research libraries the opportunity to have a greater influence on the direction and expansion of open access world-wide”.

COAR evolved out of a European project called the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER) in consultation with the international repository community. The Confederation aims
to support the expansion of open access through developing international, interoperable standards; advocating for open access policies with research funders and institutions; and working to improve deposit rates at repositories. Other founding members of COAR are from Europe, Asia, and the United States. “The collections contained in open access repositories gain tremendous value when they are part of a larger, interconnected network,” said Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of the DRIVER Project. “CARL’s membership creates an important strategic link between Canada and the international community.”

COAR was officially launched in Ghent, Belgium during Open Access Week.

———————-

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) counts as its members the 28 largest Canadian university libraries and the three major federal national libraries (Library and Archives Canada, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information [CISTI], and the Library of Parliament). CARL strives to enhance the capacity of Canada’s research libraries to partner in research and higher education, seeking effective and sustainable scholarly communication and public policy encouraging of research and broad access to scholarly information. www.carl-abrc.ca

DRIVER is a multi-phase effort whose vision and primary objective is to establish a cohesive, pan-European infrastructure of Digital Repositories, offering sophisticated functionality services to both researchers and the general public. Based on the establishment of a co-ordinated network of Digital Repositories, containing (textual) research and other scholarly publications, and on the development of an advanced-quality test-bed infrastructure, DRIVER will enable enhanced interoperability of data and service-providers while providing the required functionalities to the end users. Through its awareness and advocacy programme, it will foster the development of Digital Repositories in all European countries. With a number of studies on the current state of the Digital Repository landscape, it will also identify the most pressing issues for future developments. www.driver-repository.eu

For more information, please contact:

Brent Roe
Executive Director
Canadian Association of Research Libraries
T +1(613)562.5800 x 3652
carl@uottawa.ca

Dr. Dale Peters
Scientific Technical Manager DRIVER II
State and University Library of Goettingen
T +49 551 39 5242
peters@sub.uni‐goettingen.de

Among the speakers are Chuck Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, Cathrine Harboe-Ree, University Librarian at Monash University, who led the ARROW project and is involved in leading the ANDS project, and Christian Zimmerman, Economics professor at the University of Connecticut. Professor Nick Barr of the London School of Economics will launch the Economists Online portal.

The delegate fee is £155 (approx. €175 and US$250) and includes attendance at plenary and parallel sessions, refreshments during breaks, two lunches and VAT. For further information about how to book, speakers, travel information and hotels, please visit: http://www.neeoconference.eu/.

The conference will be hosted by FECYT with the collaboration of UNED. Check back at http://or2010.fecyt.es/ for more details–call for proposals and deadlines–as they become available.
http://or2010.fecyt.es
Stay tunned.

The OR2010 Steering Committee is pleased to announce the *Fifth
International Conference on Open Repositories*, July 6th – 9th, 2010 in
Madrid, Spain, at the “Palacio de Congresos” of Madrid. The conference
will be hosted by FECYT <http://www.fecyt.es> with de collaboration of
UNED <http://portal.uned.

VIVO, the technology supporting the network, builds a fundamental new capability to connect researchers and scholars and facilitate collaboration. Through this comprehensive network, scientists will be able to identify existing and ongoing work, explore interdisciplinary opportunities and initiate new partnerships.

“This project represents the next stage in the ongoing development of VIVO,” said Cornell Deputy Provost David Harris. “Developed by Cornell staff, VIVO makes it easy for faculty, students, staff and external constituencies to identify Cornell researchers working on a wide range of topics. We are excited that this tool will now be used to connect researchers across institutions.”

The three main participating institutions will share the work: Cornell will spearhead the development of the multi-institutional functionality of the VIVO technology; the University of Florida will focus on developing technology for keeping each site’s data current; and Indiana University Bloomington will develop social networking tools to enable researchers to find others with similar interests. Four other institutions  Scripps Research Institute, Ponce Medical School, Washington University and Weill Cornell Medical College  are also active in the initiative and will serve as implementation sites.

Librarians and information technology strategists at each institution will work together to provide a fully integrated resource for assisting researchers and building the national network. Together, the seven partner institutions will develop, test and implement VIVOweb, a multi-institutional extension to Cornell’s VIVO, over the next two years.

“Five years of time, energy and imagination created VIVO, and now that work is paying off in ways we had only imagined before,” said Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell. “This major partnership enables us to extend the capabilities of all of our institutions and reach further than we would be able to alone. Creating strong connections between institutions is a fundamental building block in advancing the mission of 21st-century research libraries.”

VIVO was initially developed at Cornell in 2003 by Jon Corson-Rikert, head of Information Technology Services at Mann Library, as a way to connect people and resources in the life sciences across Cornell’s departments, colleges and campuses. As researchers and administrators embraced the newly created network, a team of programmers, designers and librarians expanded the project to all other disciplines at Cornell, and other universities began to explore the open-source, free software. VIVO has been adopted for local networks at other universities and institutions in the United States, Australia and China. The new grant, awarded through NIH’s National Center for Research Resources, allows the project to follow VIVO’s original model and build a multi-institutional platform for the biomedical community.

The Cornell effort to develop VIVOweb will be led by Dean Krafft, the Library’s chief technology strategist; Corson-Rikert; and Medha Devare, bioinformatics and life sciences librarian. VIVOweb’s open Semantic Web/Linked Data approach will empower researchers to extend their research communities  not just via prior knowledge or serendipity, but through recommendation or suggestion networks based on commonalities described in the VIVOweb researcher profiles.

“Before VIVO, the Library heard a lot of frustration from faculty members who couldn’t find collaborators from different disciplines across campus. The idea of VIVO was to transcend administrative divisions and create a single point of access for scholarly interaction,” Devare said. “Now that VIVO is expanding across institutions, the biomedical community will be able to benefit from that bird’s-eye perspective of their research.”

For more information, visit http://vivo.cornell.edu/.

The theme of this year’s conference is Social Data and Social Networking: Connecting Social Science Communities across the Globe. Social science has begun to feel the impact of the dramatic shift in communication patterns globally, where social networking and other digital media trends are changing how social scientists study the world around them.  This theme is intended to stimulate discussion about the impact of social networking on the creation, collection, sharing, storage, preservation, dissemination, confidentiality, licensing of, and access to data.  Of particular interest is how social connectivity has facilitated multi-site and cross-national social science research.

A webform for submission of proposals will be available on the conference web site: http://ciser.cornell.edu/IASSIST/ from 12 October 2009.

•Deadline for submission: 30 November 2009.
•Notification of acceptance: 1 February 2010.

For more information about the conference, including travel and accommodation, visit the conference web site at:
http://ciser.cornell.edu/IASSIST/ .

About IASSIST

IASSIST is an international organization of professionals working in and with information technology and data services to support research and teaching in the social sciences. Typical workplaces include data archives/libraries, statistical agencies, research centers, libraries, academic departments, government departments, and non-profit organizations, see http://www.iassistdata.org for further information.

The mission of the DuraSpace Small Archives Group is to address these needs. As a community, not only can we further preservation access and foster knowledge  sharing, but we can collaborate. This community is intended for the thousands of small cultural heritage organizations who lack resources to implement a solution on their own. For most of us, a “small archive” is a cultural heritage institution with one or fewer software developers on staff, perhaps even without an active webmaster.

To ensure that we are focusing on those concerns most relevant to small archives, we would appreciate your responses to a short (10-15 minutes) survey to better understand what is being done, and what is needed to ensure long-term access and preservation in small cultural heritage institutions.

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229DKEFJWUP

We hope to share results of the survey at a BOF session at the Museum Computer Network conference in  Portland, OR on November 11-14, 2009 and at the DISH conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands on December 8-10, 2009.  We will also share results and information online at our wiki home:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229DKEFJWUP

You can find out more about the Small Archives group at:
http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Small+Archives

You can also participate by clicking:
http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/SA-Get+Involved!

We greatly appreciate your participation.

http://islandora.ca/virtualbox

including basic instructions on how to get the system up and running, and upload some of your own data. The UPEI team is also working on an update to the version that was recently demonstrated at Sun PASIG, and will replace this link with the newer version when it is ready. A new naming scheme for the download will be added so you can ensure that you have the latest version. Contact Mark Leggott or Paul Pound if you have questions or comments.

During September the DuraSpace community was invited to share their passion, knowledge of collecting, curating, managing and disseminating digital repository resources by telling an inspiring story about their experiences, and entering the DuraSpace/SPARC Open Access Week Contest. Find out more about the winners, who will be joined by SPARC Communications Director Jennifer McLennan, as they discuss their projects in the context of Open Access.

Read the winning entries here: http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/duraspace/2009/10/08/announcing-the-duraspacesparc-oa-week-contest-winners/

Register for the web seminar here: http://www.education-webevents.com/
This web seminar will also be available online after tomorrow.

To celebrate Open Access Week, DuraSpace, providing open technologies for durable digital content, has released a package of tools and resources to help information managers everywhere learn more about how to make their information available, accessible and durable (http://duraspace.org/oaweek.php) that includes:

• Tools for Decision-makers: DuraSpace Open Technologies Spec Sheets

• Inspiration: DuraSpace/SPARC Open Access Week Contest

• Education: Learn More about DuraSpace Open Technologies with Free “All About Repositories” Web Seminars

•    SPARC welcomes the world to Open Access Week 2009. In a new video letter, SPARC’s Heather Joseph and Jennifer McLennan welcome participants and supporters of Open Access everywhere to the Week’s events. The brief, 6-minute clip sets the stage for Open Access Week 2009, noting that it’s an important opportunity to raise awareness, celebrate progress made in advancing Open Access to date, and to inspire the community to find new ways to continue the momentum. SPARC’s spokespeople point to the potential impact of Open Access for the public good, the many OA-related developments over the past few years, the variety of events taking place this month, and the simple ways to express support during Open Access Week. The clip is available under embargo until 12:00PM BST (7:00AM Eastern), Sunday, October 18th, at http://www.vimeo.com/7048906. For advance access, contact Jennifer McLennan through jennifer@arl.org.

•    SPARC releases Open Access 101 video. In partnership with student advocates, who are increasingly active around Open Access issues, SPARC has developed a new, animated Open Access 101 video. This 3-minute clip highlights the widespread concern among students for the cost of access, the dynamics of the scholarly publishing process, how Open Access is made possible, and the opportunities created by the open accessibility and reuse of research results. Open Access 101 is available to view or download free at http://vimeo.com/6973160.

The Voices of Open Access video series is also available. This series of one-minute videos, produced for Open Access Day 2008, captures why teachers, patient advocates, librarians, students, research funders, and physician scientists are committed to Open Access to research. Collectively, the voices define Open Access as a fundamental component of a new system for exchanging scholarly research results, where: health is transformed; research outputs are maximized to their fullest extent; efficiencies in the research process enable faster discoveries; the best science is made possible; young people are inspired; access transcends the wealth of the institution; cost savings are realized across the research process; and medical research conducted for the public good is made available to everyone who needs it. The Voices of Open Access series HD videos are available to view or download free at http://vimeo.com/oaday08.

•    Leading international higher ed organizations join Open Access Week. The Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) of the UK and SURF in the Netherlands have joined as Organizers of Open Access Week 2009. Organizers, which include SPARC, the Public Library of Science, Students for Free Culture, eIFL, the Open Access Directory, and OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), are responsible for informing the scope of Open Access Week programming, expanding global participation in the event, and managing key resources.

Open Access Week is also supported by a broad array of partners, who promote participation in the week as well as programming specific to their constituencies. 2009 partners include: SPARC Europe, SPARC Japan, Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden), Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (UK), SciELO-FAPESP-BIREME (Brazil), The Open Society Institute (New York & Budapest), SURF (The Netherlands), Open-access.net (Germany), The Public Knowledge Project (Canada), My Open Archive (Japan), DuraSpace (US), and IssueLabs (US).

•    It’s not too late to get involved in Open Access Week 2009.  Here are five simple ways YOU can participate:

1.    OPEN your email, go viral. Send a video link or 3 little-known OA facts to your friends online.
2.    OPEN your sense of style. Wear a t-shirt, button or sticker (real or virtual).
3.    OPEN a video. Invite a few friends – online, in person, or at your next class – and play one of the
Voices of Open Access videos (http://vimeo.com/oaday08).
4.    OPEN a table. In your library, in your department or faculty lounge, or in the student union, set up a
table where you can talk with friends and colleagues about Open Access. Take advantage of available
sticker templates, flyers, and posters.
5.    OPEN an event invitation. It’s not too late to invite your contacts to get together anytime from October
19 – 23. Tight schedules? Get together by phone. Watch or listen to a video and then open
discussion.

See www.openaccessweek.org for resources.

PARTICIPATING? Please be sure and add your details to the events listing at http://oad.simmons.edu. Take pictures, record your events, and share via www.openaccessweek.org.

•    “How do we pay for Open Access?” is a question that many OAWeek discussions will touch upon. A new SPARC guide, released October 8, explores income models to support open-access distribution currently in practice. “Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice” examines the use of supply-side revenue streams (such as article processing fees, advertising) and demand-side models (including versioning, use-triggered fees). The guide provides an overview of income models currently in use to support open-access journals, including a description of each model along with examples of journals currently employing it. “Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice” is online at http://www.arl.org/sparc/publisher/incomemodels.

More resources and news on plans for Open Access Week 2009 are available at http://www.openaccessweek.org and through the Web sites of the organizers:

•    SPARC - http://www.arl.org/sparc
•    The Public Library of Science - http://www.plos.org/
•    OASIS – http://www.openoasis.org
•    Open Access Directory – http://oad.simmons.edu
•    SURF – http://www.surf.nl
•    JISC – http://www.jisc.ac.uk

Luise Barnikel, Sales and Marketing Associate, IssueLab (http://www.issuelab.org/), described the “2008 flexAbility Toolkit” designed to help employers with workplace disability issues in her winning entry entitled, “Social Policy Research: How Access Shaped Practice.” Bryan Beecher, Director, Computing & Network Services, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/), University of Michigan, supports the mission of ICPSR which has delivered content using advanced technologies for six decades. He won with his entry, “Cold, Dark, and Lonely: An Archive Moves Online.”  The history and culture of Forsythe County, North Carolina is the focus of a collection of over 12000 digital images (http://digitalforsyth.org) that Erik Mitchell described in his winning story “Building a Community Digital Library Using Dspace.”

Here are the winning stories:

Social Policy Research: How Access Shaped Practice

By Luise Barnikel Once upon a time, there was a nonprofit research document titled “2008 flexAbility Toolkit,” carefully prepared by the Oregon Business Leadership Network (OBLN) to help employers with issues of disabilities in the workplace. Because the third sector infrastructure has never had a place to pool its collective knowledge and introduce new audiences to its work, the OBLN’s small staff worked feverishly to push “flexAbility” to key constituents. In the meantime, IssueLab, an open access publishing forum for nonprofit research, had begun archiving exactly such documents and disseminating them to a broader set of policymakers, librarians, students, activists, and many more.

When the time came for IssueLab’s bi-monthly CloseUp (a special collection of research) on Disability and Employment, it was clear that “flexAbility” should become a part of this collection and the corresponding outreach that pushes the CloseUp to individuals and communities online. Instantly, “flexAbility” was happy when it was uploaded to IssueLab. It was now categorized and easy to find, openly accessible, and could do the OBLN proud by being read widely. Furthermore, a staff member from the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (a target for the CloseUp outreach) replied to IssueLab that portions “flexAbility” would now be included in upcoming presentations–a direct application of nonprofit research in everyday practice!

It quickly became clear that social policy research and open access repositories are a match made in heaven. And they lived happily ever after.

About IssueLab

IssueLab–“bringing non-profit research into focus”–makes it easy to locate, access, and engage with insightful and valuable research from non-profit organizations worldwide on complex social issues.

—

Cold, Dark, and Lonely: An Archive Moves Online

By Bryan Beecher The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has been collecting, preserving, and disseminating social science data for nearly sixty years. During its six decades ICPSR has used contemporary technologies for delivering its content: mailing magnetic tapes to member organizations through the 80’s, FTP download from a server into the 90’s, and then Web-based download and online analysis in the 21st century. However, while ICPSR’s processes and technologies for making its content available to the world have continually evolved, its archival storage systems have not moved as quickly.

For most of ICPSR’s history its archival holdings have resided on pairs of tapes. Tape has always been inexpensive; a good value in terms of bits of storage per dollar. Tape has been sturdy, durable, and reliable. And tape has long been “green,” requiring little energy to operate and cool compared to spinning disk. However, for all of tape’s virtues, in a “hot, flat, and crowded” data world, it left ICPSR with an archival storage solution that was cold, dark and lonely. Because archival content lived off-line it made it impossible for ICPSR data managers to browse past versions of datasets and documentation; instead one had to request specific content by ID, time, and role (e.g., “I need to see all original deposits from March 2005 related to ICPSR Study #12345″). Off-line also meant it was impossible to perform searches over the archival materials, and in a world where Google is always at one’s fingertips, this became an increasingly inconvenient burden. And, finally, while ICPSR has always maintained robust systems for managing the content and its metadata, these systems were idiosyncratic, and it would have been difficult to transfer content to another data steward had ICPSR ceased to exist as a viable organization.

In 2006 ICPSR made two organizational changes. (1) it created the new position of Digital Preservation Officer, and recruited Nancy McGovern to fill that role; and, (2) it moved the archival storage function into the technology organization directed by Bryan Beecher. Over the course of the next eighteen months, ICPSR’s archival holdings were transferred from tape to disk, and its metadata management systems were upgraded significantly. These two actions addressed the “browse” and “search” problems. However, even though ICPSR’s archival content became a bit less “cold” and “dark,” it still suffered from a certain level of idiosyncrasy. It was clear that this content would need to move into a system that was standards-based and which would facilitate sharing.

In 2009 ICPSR began moving its archival content into a Fedora repository. ICPSR has over 6TB of archival storage stretching over millions of files, and thousands of aggregate-level objects. Also, ICPSR received a grant through the NSF EAGER program to create and share content models and Fedora-based components for social science datasets and documentation, and this will allow ICPSR to articulate its vision for using Fedora more fully, and to execute that vision more quickly.

About ICPSR

An international consortium of about 700 academic institutions and research organizations, ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community.

ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.

—

Building a Community Digital Library Using DSpace

By Erik Mitchell Over the course of the last three years Wake Forest University has built a digital library comprised of photographs held by multiple institutions in Forsyth County, NC. The grant-funded project called “Digital Forsyth” sought to build a collection of digital photographs representing the history of Forsyth County, NC.

By using DSpace the organizations (Wake Forest University, Old Salem Museums and Gardens, Winston Salem State University, and Forsyth County Public Library) were able to catalog over 12000 digital images which were then exported from dspace and made accessible via a blog (http://digitalforsyth.org). By using open source software for the entire project (DSpace for cataloging and digital curation, Wordpress for public searching and community services such as commenting and tagging) and open access policies to provide access to the collection, the grant helped build a digital library system that brings the community into the collection building process and allows multiple institutions to collaborate in cataloging.

About Digital Forsyth

Through digitization, Digital Forsyth, a collaboration of cultural heritage institutions in Forsyth County, North Carolina, facilitates access to cultural, historical and scientific heritage photograph collections, thereby increasing interest in and knowledge of the past and informing future generations.

The Ambassador Program seeks to develop a global network of volunteers who can help new and potential users get started with DSpace and/or help solicit the necessary help for users with questions. While the Ambassador is not intended to be a technical expert on DSpace, they should be able to answer basic questions about DSpace and help point people in the right direction for more technical questions. Ideally the Ambassador will also help to identify resources, such as new references or service providers in their country or region. Some Ambassadors may also be involved in planning regional DSpace user group meetings or trainings. Ambassadors are encouraged leverage their efforts along with other networks, associations and groups that may already exist in their country. Already the program has 18 volunteers to serve as Ambassadors from around the world. Check out the list of countries/regions here: http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/DSpace_Ambassador_Program.

The success of any open-source project lies with the community voluntarily contributing its collective knowledge, energy, enthusiasm and effort. If you are interested in volunteering to serve as a DSpace Ambassador for your country or region, please contact Valorie Hollister at val@dspace.org.

Several significant bugfixes have also been included:

• XML and JSON results are now correctly encoded with UTF-8.
• Graph URIs are no longer canonicalized if they are not in the RMI scheme.
• Improved query planning for some queries. Mulgara’s queries are
still DISTINCT only, so the speed improvements associate with this
change will not appear until 2.1.5.
• Fixed handling of graphs accessed through HTTPS, particularly on Mac.

For the full list of updates, please see the release notes and documentation for details:

• Release notes: http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.1.4
• Documentation: http://mulgara.org/trac/wiki/Docs

The bug fixes in this release mostly occurred due to your requests. Thanks for your contributions, and please send your feedback. You can get in touch on the mailing lists, or submit a report to the bug tracker: http://mulgara.org/trac/report.

Mulgara is part of the DuraSpace (http://DuraSpace.org)  group of open technology projects characterized by thriving consensus-driven, developer communitites that strive to produce high quality products that ensure sophisticated access and management of long-term durable digital information.

• Overview
• The Fedora Basics
• Using the Fedora Repository Software
• Search and Discovery
• Fedora-based Applications

http://www.educause.edu/E2009

If you are planning to attend the conference in person, please join colleagues in the open source communities of DuraSpace (DSpace and Fedora Commons), JA-SIG, Kuali and Sakai at a cocktail reception:

Date and time: Wednesday, 11/4/09 at 6:15pm
Location: Hyatt Capitol Ballroom 4, Level 4

Talk with colleagues from schools that may be considering joining these communities,
and learn more about these projects.

Hope to see you there!

DSpace continues to be the most popular repository solution, with well over a third of the known institutional repositories using the DSpace software. Each month there are between 20-30 new instances of DSpace. Check out “Who’s Using DSpace” to see the complete list. If your repository isn’t included, please register with us as we’d love to include your organization in our growing community!

DuraSpace Updates from Fedora Commons and DSpace: Web Seminar, Sept. 30
The next Sun/DuraSpace/SPARC “All About Repositories” web seminar will take place on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 10:00am PT. Register at http://www.education-webevents.com/.

DuraSpace flagship open source repository platforms are preparing to release new versions of Fedora (late 2009) and DSpace (Oct. 2009). Please join presenters Chris Wilper and Brad McLean for an overview of current Fedora and DSpace development initiatives and community updates. This 60 min. web event will give an overview of Dspace 1.6
features like better statistics, an embargo feature, a batch metadata editing feature, and over 50 bug fixes and feature requests.

——————————————————-
Focus on DuraCloud at LOC Web Seminar Sept. 30
Please join Michele Kimpton, Chief Business Officer of DuraSpace, for a WebEx web seminar sponsored by the Library of Congress (LOC) NDIIPP on Sept. 30, 2009. She will present an overview of the DuraCloud platform, currently in development. Her presentation will include details about the current DuraCloud pilot program in progress with New
York Public Library and Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Meeting Details:
Topic: DuraCloud
Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Time: 2:00 pm, Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -04:00, New York)
Meeting Number: 483 677 904
Meeting Password: September09

Please click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.

To join the online meeting (Now from iPhones too!)
1. Go to
https://issevents.webex.com/issevents/j.php?ED=125825167&UID=1015427367&
PW=8d9db53738011b1208395e054102
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: September09
4. Click “Join Now”.

To join the teleconference only
Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300
Toll-free dialing restrictions:
http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf

For assistance
1. Go to https://issevents.webex.com/issevents/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.

Please pass this information about joining the session on to those who are particularly interested in digital preservation. If your project or organization would like to share details of the work your doing with the NDIIPP community in a WebEx seminar, please let email Michelle Gallinger at mgal@loc.gov.

The building blocks of scientific discovery–data, analyses, and related documents–are sometimes lost because scientists do not have access to integrated tools that allow materials to be collected and managed when and where they are generated.  Providing intuitive tools and services embedded in scientific workflows is the goal of Kepler-based SciencePipes (http://sciencepipes.org/alpha/home/) which is a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Information Science Program and is funded by the National Science Digital Library Program.

If you would like to be an alpha SciencePipes user, please email paul.e.allen@cornell.edu.