With over 900 repository implementations worldwide, DuraSpace Solution Communities seek to increase resources, connections, skills and ideas by engaging people at all organizational levels in order to improve open technologies and strengthen the communities that use them. By providing leadership, tools and coordination DuraSpace Solution Communities bring tech savvy decision-makers together around critical community issues to establish the conditions in which collaboration can flourish to provide durable access to our digital heritage.

Thorny Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Alliances, and Val Hollister, Director of Community Development, DSpace Project, will offer a free “All About Repositores” web seminar on Monday November 23, 2009 entitled “Take a New Look at DuraSpace Solution Communities” to introduce new tools and resources for Solution Communities (register here: http://www.education-webevents.com/). They will explain how to get involved in grassroots efforts to meet the challenges of rapidly changing information environments faced by knowledge organizations everywhere. They will also discuss the Solution Community bottom-up organizational approach based on the theory that higher levels of order will emerge from complex systems under the right conditions.

Solution Communities in Data Curation, Preservation and Archiving, Scholars Workbench, and Small Archives have begun investigations into how to leverage collective interests and priorities. To support Solution Community efforts, DuraSpace has developed a suite of tools and offers free access to anyone with an interest in participating. Individuals will find several ways to engage with Solution Communities including wikis (http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Home) that contain a growing knowledge base, and mailing lists for specific communication around Solution Community topics. In addition, the new DuraSpace social network pilot in Crowdvine (http://duraspace.crowdvine.com/) features informal groupings for each Solution Community so individuals can connect around their particular interest.

ABOUT DURASPACE

DuraSpace (http://DuraSpace.org) is a not-for-profit organization that is the result of joining Fedora Commons and DSpace, two not-for-profits established to sustain their open source repository software. The two organizations combined forces to pursue a common mission and to expand their offerings into cloud computing and scholarly/scientific “cyberinfrastructure” for universities, libraries, and research institutions, archives, museums, NGOs, and more.

DuraSpace is committed to providing technologies and services that help ensure that our digital heritage is accessible over the long term.  Accordingly, the DuraSpace technology portfolio inherently addresses the issue of durability of digital content. Durability is not only essential for high integrity access to digital information, but it is also a necessary pre-requisite to the process of digital preservation as expressed in the DuraSpace organizational byline, “Open technologies for durable digital content.”

Duraspace will lead two breakout sessions–one focused on the DuraCloud service, and one about DuraSpace Solution Communities that provide leadership, tools and coordination around critical community issues to establish the conditions in which collaboration can flourish to provide durable access to our digital heritage.

The day will focus on finding topics of mutual co-operation in the areas of Repositories, Digital Libraries, Data Curation, Management of eScience content, and Long-Term Preservation. Experts from Harvard University, Columbia University, MIT, Sun Microsystems, and other local institutions will discuss their projects and new technologies, including open storage, sustainable preservation architectures, and new reference architectures.

Agenda items will include:

Sun PASIG focus an global trends

Sun in education

Use cases presented by local institutions

Sun technology overview and reference architecture

Breakout sessions discussing partner solutions, Storage Archive Manager (SAM) and Infinite Archive System (IAS)

Sun’s PASIG (http://www.sun-pasig.ning.com/) community provides support for organizations challenged with preserving and archiving important research and cultural heritage materials. Founding members include The Alberta Library, The British Library, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University and other leading global libraries and universities. This is the second PASIG-related regional conference directed at fostering local collaboration. Ideas and input from this conference will be incorporated into the semi-annual global PASIG events.

Space is limited and people must register to attend: https://www.suneventreg.com//cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=2965

Santa Barbara, CA Researchers at the University of California have partnered with dozens of other universities and agencies to create DataONE (http://dataone.org), a global data access and preservation network for earth and environmental scientists that will support breakthroughs in environmental research.  DataONE (Data Observation Network for Earth) is one of two $20 million awards made this year as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) DataNet program. The collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often incompatible scientific data.  Resulting studies will range from research that illuminates fundamental environmental processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions.

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, the Department of Computer Science and Genome Center at UC Davis, and the California Digital Library at the UC Office of the President are integrally involved in the NSF DataONE initiative.  Across these UC partners, the several million dollar award will drive advanced research and data acquisition, storage, mining, integration, and visualization for DataONE. The resulting computing and processing “cyberinfrastructure” will be made permanently available for use by the broader UC community and international science communities. DataONE is led by the University of New Mexico, and includes additional partner organizations across the United States as well as from Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia.

“Scientists have spent hundreds of years collecting environmental data – measuring temperature, counting fish and butterflies,” says Stephanie Hampton, Deputy Director of NCEAS. “We already know quite a lot, when you estimate the volume of scientific data that must exist out there, but the challenge is to find those data sets and then put them together in a manner that helps to address the important questions for science and society. DataONE will be that portal for environmental data.”

The DataONE team will study how a vast digital data network can provide secure and permanent access into the future, and also encourage scientists to share their data. The team will help determine data and data citation standards, as well as create the tools for organizing, managing, and publishing data.

As one of five DataNet collaborations envisioned by the NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.htm), DataONE will build a set of geographically distributed Coordinating Nodes that play an important role in facilitating all of the activities of the global network.  The initial three Coordinating Nodes will be at UC Santa Barbara (housed at the Davidson Library), at the University of New Mexico, and at the University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“Institutions have made extensive investments in infrastructure for managing data at their local institutions and in discipline-specific consortia, but these systems generally don’t interoperate,” says Matthew Jones, Director of Informatics Research and Development at NCEAS. “DataONE will provide a critically needed interoperability layer that will allow scientists from diverse domains to collaborate on pressing environmental science challenges.”

Scientific data integration and management also occupies computer science researchers who develop methods and tools that support all stages of the data life cycle. “Effective annotation and integration of data, and efficient management of data lineage information are hot research topics in the database and scientific workflows communities,” says Bertram Ludaescher, professor of computer science at UC Davis, whose team specializes in scientific workflow and data integration technologies, and storage and querying of data provenance.

Libraries have traditionally played a critical role in preserving and providing access to scholarly materials and recently have begun to focus on the complex challenges associated with managing scientific data.  “Libraries don’t have the capacity to address these challenges individually.  We need to partner with researchers, information technologists, and domain specialists to address these complex problems” says Patricia Cruse, Director of the UC Curation Center at the California Digital Library.

DataONE includes experts from library, computer, and environmental sciences explicitly to bridge these worlds and to develop an infrastructure to serve science for many decades to come.

About the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

NCEAS was established in 1995. The organization has hosted more than 4,000 scientists from over 50 countries, and supported more than 430 collaborative projects in ecology and related fields. NCEAS scientists develop new techniques in informatics, and apply general knowledge of ecological systems to specific issues, such as the loss of biotic diversity, global change, and sustainability of marine ecosystems. NCEAS is among the top 1 percent of 38,000 institutions evaluated for scientific impact in environmental research. NCEAS is funded by the National Science Foundation, the state of California, the University of California and numerous other donors.  For further information contact Stephanie Hampton, Deputy Director, NCEAS, at hampton@nceas.ucsb.edu or (805) 892-2505 or Matt Jones, Director of Informatics Research and Development, NCEAS at jones@nceas.ucsb.edu.

About the UC Curation Center and the California Digital Library

The UC Curation Center (UC3) of the California Digital Library (CDL) was established in 2009.  UC3 is a central preservation and curation service provider addressing the system-wide needs of the 10 campuses of the University of California, one of the pre-eminent public universities of the world.  The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve.  For further information contact Patricia Cruse, Director, UC Curation Center, at patricia.cruse@ucop.edu or 510/987-9016.

About Professor Ludaescher

Bertram Ludaescher is professor at the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Genome Center, both at UC Davis. Work in his Data & Knowledge Systems (DAKS) lab is focused on scientific workflow design and optimization, data provenance, knowledge representation, and data integration. He is  involved in several collaborative R&D projects, including the DOE Scientific Data Management Center project (SciDAC/SDM) and NSF projects to develop workflow technology (Kepler-CORE) and cyberinfrastructure for bioinformatics and environmental observatory applications.  Prof. Ludaescher received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Until 2004 he was a research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD.  He can be contacted at ludaesch@ucdavis.edu.

On Thursday, January 28, 2010, we’re hosting a Fedora/DuraSpace technically-focused “meet-up,” led by DuraSpace’s Thorny Staples, for library and campus IT staff, faculty, and stakeholders, as well as regional Fedora community members. Topics include an exploration of repository architecture and functionality, interface strategies, cloud opportunities, and any direction the participant-driven discussion takes us!  We’ll end the afternoon with opportunities to share what’s working and what’s challenging data curation-wise at your institutions!

More information about the conference, keynotes, and registration* can be found on the Alliance web site at http://www.coalliance.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=291&Itemid=103, or contact the Alliance at 303.759.3399, or adr@coalliance.org.

This event is sponsored by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries with the generous support of BCR.

*Each Alliance Member Institution is welcome to send up to 8 attendees, at the Dean’s/Director’s discretion. As an alternative to designated individuals completing the online registration form, libraries may opt to send member attendees lists to geri@coalliance.org by January 8, 2010. Additional Member attendees may be subject to the general registration fee of $30/day.

We want to hear about new projects, large and small, and new technologies that will have an impact on higher education in the years to come.

Join us in San Diego this March:
Ten Years of Open Source Innovation
March 8 - 10, 2009
The Town and Country Resort, San Diego, California

Supplementary Seminars on March 7th and the afternoon of March 10th
Developer Workshops, March 11 - 12

Call for Proposals

Deadline for submission of proposals for half or full day seminars has passed and will not be extended. Deadline for submission of proposals for all other sessions: extended to November 25, 2009

Conference site: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html

Dear Colleague:

Help us celebrate Jasig’s 10th anniversary in San Diego with outstanding speakers and special events.

The focus is on innovation this year. We’ll be highlighting new and established work from higher education institutions:  Projects you should know about; local projects in search of community; creative work by established communities of practice; projects that exist only as a gleam in the eye of a creative developer.

Come and see presentations and seminars on new technologies soon to impact higher education.  We’re seeking talks on topics such as Scala, Spring 3, deployment to the Cloud, Groovy, Grails, REST, Jersey, mobile applications, etc.

We invite you to propose talks, seminars, birds-of-a-feather sessions, demos, and poster session displays on new and current campus applications: Enterprise portlets, CAS, uPortal, Bedework Calendar, Identity & Access Management, Fluid, ESUP Helpdesk, OpenRegistry, Sakai, Kuali, Internet2 Middleware Solutions, Fedora and DSpace, and others.

Talks will be presented in one of four tracks:

Designing & Developing

For developers, architects, UX designers, testers. Presentations for people who build applications.

Deploying & Integrating

For people who need to make applications work on campus: developers, content providers, team leaders, evangelists. In particular, we would like to highlight work that integrates open source projects within the enterprise infrastructure and with each other.

Managing & Governing

What are best practices for managing community source projects or their deployments on campus? For encouraging adoption? For gaining acceptance and campus buy-in? For engaging your community in the processes? Presentations for managers, team leaders, executives, planners and strategists.

Looking Ahead

What are the technologies that will impact higher education in the coming years? What project work, prototypes, plans, and local campus applications would you like to share with a community of your peers?

Half-day Supplementary Seminars will be held in the morning and afternoon on Sunday, March 7th as well as on Wednesday (March 10th) afternoon.

Proposals may be entered on the Jasig Conference Website. Proposalsrequire a Title, an Abstract (under 500 words), a Presenter Profile, and some basic affiliation information.  This year we are also asking proposal submitters to select tags that best describe their proposals.

Submit your proposal directly at http://www.ja-sig.org/jasigconf/call-form.jsp?conf_id=jasig17 or from the conference home page, where you can find all the details: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html (Click the Call for Proposals link on the left).

We look forward to seeing you at Ten Years of Open Source Innovation!

The Jasig 2010 Spring Conference Planning Committee

This interest was reflected in a “Point Counterpoint” session held in a small room packed to overflowing featuring Michael Dieckmann, Senior Associate VP and CIO, University of West Florida and Melissa Woo, Director, Research Cyberinfrastructure, Network and Operations Services, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who were there to shine a light on perceived cloud computing perils (Woo) and opportunities (Dieckmann).  By the numbers in the room “Cloud Computing: Hype or Hope” was was clearly of interest to many attendees who shared concerns that for higher ed in particular, it is imperative to understand the bottom line in IT services  when it comes using cloud computing services for mission-centric institutional activities.

They showed comparisons between Gartner’s Five Attributes of Cloud Computing (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1035013) and the NIST Definition of Cloud Computing—“Essential Characteristics” (http://arielsilverstone.com/resources/nist-cloud-computing/) and contrasted these to what they believed were key characteristics for the successful use of cloud computing by university IT departments. They suggested that universities require IT (including infrastructure) as a network-delivered service that can be massively shared, is extremely flexible, and that allows for a “pay as you go” economic model.

Dieckmann pointed out that to some extent cloud computing is the way the IT industry is evolving, “Massive economies of scale will drive cloud computing because it is the most cost-effective way to provide services to our institutions.” He wondered at what point in the evolution of the service you have to ask about what the reason for doing things in the cloud is. He emphasized that we do not have to act like we are being forced to swallow a poison pill because there are many advantages, and ultimately inevitability, to adopting the use of cloud technologies.

Woo countered by asking why university IT leaders are focused on “when” instead of “why”? “Why are we not asking our stakeholders about what they need,” She queried? She used Gmail as an example of how large services go down and create security risks, data loss, and data that is “locked-up.”

Dieckman suggested that we are throwing our responsibilities “over the wall” and encouraged listeners to step out of their IT silos and think about cloud computing in a larger campus context. “It should not be all about cost,” He said.

He qualified this view by pointing out that economic sustainability coupled with green computing are driving the debate on campuses. Gathering departmental servers into central data units has already occurred. Campus customers may not care whether it’s an on-campus server or a virtual server located somewhere else. As long as systems are managed by professional systems engineers then perhaps central IT should migrate to external services.

Diekmann and Woo concurred that an evaluation of the measure of harm to campuses if you cannot trust that data will be there would be a useful decision-making tool for individual institutions. For the academy the “Crown jewel assets are our data.” Once you have transferred to an external service what do you do if the economics change?   Interoperable cloud provider standards do not yet exist that might protect institutional assets stored in the cloud.

Woo believes that IT outsourcing is a general problem that outsourcing to cloud providers only exacerbates. There is a perception that “we (campus IT) are better” than the commercial providers. The idea that things are always better on the inside than they are on the outside, however, is not always true.

Other issues around integrating in-house services with cloud services include identity management and branding in the cloud that may be threatened by across-the-board eLearning and eManagment tools. Maintaining a coherent and recognizable computing environment in the cloud is challenging right now for colleges and universities who are concerned about leveraging their digital brands in an era of increasingly competitive and distributed online learning.

The purpose of the Scholars Workbench group and other solutions community groups is to create opportunities for people who are interested in topics that strongly relate to the DuraSpace mission (everything that relates to the problem of the durability of digital information, in short) to find each other. The idea is that if people can find each other and begin to share information, we can possibly create the conditions for true collaboration to develop. We are hoping to involve technically-aware decision makers who have resources to share, along with anyone who has an strong interest in the subject.

It seems to me that the focus of the Scholars Workbench community should be the idea that all information that is created in the process of scholarly and scientific activities should flow into repositories, from which it can then be used in the most effortless ways; it is always possible to make the decision to throw content away later, but it is not always possible to collect it after the fact.

Rather than being focused on creating the perfect complete application, it seems we should be focused on assembling the set of interfaces, standards and tools that can best be used to connect repositories like DSpace, Fedora and EPrints to the tools that have flexible, adaptable input/output capabilities. Ideally, this group could get to the point
where most of us are working on the smart tools sooner rather than later. I could imagine getting a subgroup going that was particularly interested in the I/O issues, with most of us concentrating on the tools that help in the content creation workflows, and the analysis and publishing activities that are ultimately the point. I would hope that
a lot of this work would be in adapting a lot of what has already been done.

Please visit http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Scholars+Workbench for more information, or to join the Scholars Workbench Solution Community mailing list.

Take a New Look at DuraSpace Solution Communities
Monday, November 23, 2009
Time: 10:00am PT, 1:00 ET

DuraSpace Community leaders, developers and users leverage open technologies to implement more than 1,000 repositories worldwide.  All together they face tough issues within the context of the open source development process.  DuraSpace Solutions Communities bring tech savvy decision-makers together around critical community questions to establish the conditions — resources, knowledge and skills — in which collaboration can flourish.

Join Thorny Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Alliances, and Val Hollister, Director of Community Development, DSpace Project, to find out about new tools and resources that are now available for Solution Communities, and how to get involved in grassroots efforts to meet the rapidly changing challenges in knowledge organization environments during this 60 minute free web seminar.

Open Storage SAM Architectures
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Time: 8:00am PT, 11:00 ET

Experts will review Sun Open Archive technologies and Storage Archive Manager (SAM)-based architectures for repositories.  This webinar will cover the needs for industry standards-based products, managing technology for a long-term archive, planning for disaster recovery, and key solutions that are optimized on Sun open storage.  This webinar is targeted at repository and preservation project managers just starting to explore the present and future IT needs of their repository.

Repositories in the Cloud: How to Participate in the DuraCloud Pilot Program
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Time: 10:00am PT, 1:00 ET

The DuraSpace organization is conducting a pilot program to test a new cloud-based service, DuraCloud. Cloud technologies use remote computers to provide local services through the Internet. DuraCloud lets an institution provide data storage and access without having to maintain its own dedicated technical infrastructure. Attend this web seminar presented by Michele Kimpton, CBO DuraSpace, to find out how your organization can participate.

Enabling (Open) Scholarship
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Time: 10:00am PT, 1:00 ET

Institutional/Discipline Repositories providing the world with scholarly work in an Open Access fashion is the solid foundation on which we can build a fully open scholarship community.  Greg Grossmeier, Community Assistant, Creative Commons will provide the background of Creative Commons, and what it is doing to enable the open scholarship community.

Closer to home, DuraSpace open technology/open access news and events are reflected out regularly through the DuraSpace Blog at http://expertvoices.nsdl/DuraSpace and through Web sites. You may subscribe to the RSS for this blog at http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=DuraSpace. Follow DuraSpace breaking news and information on Twitter at http://twitter.com/DuraSpace.

Cloud Computing and Repositories: Fedorazon Final Report                                                                                                    [Digital Koans] Fedorazon is an early, experimental, out-of-the-box version of the Fedora Commons repository software preconfigured for cloud installation.                                                                                                              http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/11/03/cloud-computing-and-repositories-fedorazon-final-report/

The Cloud, the Researcher and the Repository                                                                                       [Repository Man blog] “There’s currently a lot of buzz about DuraSpace, the DSpace and Fedora project to incorporate cloud storage into repositories.”

http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2009/02/cloud-researcher-and-repository.html

Getting Started with Fedora                                                                                                      [Digital Koans] “Whether you want to adopt one of the existing Fedora-based solutions or develop you own, this general introduction should be useful to you.”

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/10/08/getting-started-with-fedora/

HOWTO Install Fedora-Commons Repository on Debian                                                                                                     [Fak3r blog]  “My Super, simple HOWTO get Feodora-commons up and running in a development environment in Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu Linux.”

http://fak3r.com/2009/03/17/howto-install-fedora-commons-repository-software-on-debian/

Institutional Repository on a Shoestring                                                                                                     [DLib Magazine] The authors describe Humboldt State University’s (HSU), one of the smaller campuses in the 23-member California State University (CSU) system, digital repository project based on DSpace.                                                  

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january09/wrenn/01wrenn.html

MIT Open Access Articles Collection Launched in DSpace@MIT                                                                                         [Digital Koans] MIT has launched a new collection of authors’ final submitted manuscripts in DSpace@MIT, the MIT Open Access Articles Collection.

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/category/dspace/

Sun Microsystems Showcases Open Source Technologies at Educause 2009: Implementing Change at Columbia University Libraries                                                                                [Sun Microsystems Virtual Press Office] “Columbia’s integration of the SAM technology, a combination of StorEdge ™ 6140, 4500 and L500 tape storage media technologies, along with Fedora Commons Repository Software from duraspace.org allows it to remotely locate and manage digital artifacts on three tiers of storage in geographically disparate locations for long-term content preservation.”                             

http://www.virtualpressoffice.com/publicsiteContentFileAccess?fileContentId=199780&fromOtherPageToDisableHistory=Y&menuName=News&sId=273&sInfo=Y

Webinars Focus on Cloud Computing, Institutional Repositories, and Open Access                                                                                                                           [Wake Forest University Professional Development]  “Webinars that look at cloud computing and its role in institutional repositories.”

http://blog.zsr.wfu.edu/pd/2009/09/22/webinars-focus-on-cloud-computing-insitutional-repositories-and-open-access/

Word+SWORD+Ingester=Word to DSpace Deposit                                                                                                                          [Digital Koans] “Stuart Lewis describes how to get documents into DSpace from Word via SWORD and a custom DSpace ingester.”

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/07/05/word-sword-ingester-word-to-dspace-deposit/

Please contact DuraSpace if you have a news to share, or if your project has recently appeared in the press.

Washington, DC  “For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible,” is the message that forty one Nobel Prize-winning scientists in medicine, physics, and chemistry gave to Congress in an open letter delivered yesterday. The letter marks the fourth time in five years that leading scientists have called on Congress to ensure free, timely access to the results of federally funded research – this time asking leaders to support the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 (S.1373).

The Nobel Prize-winners write:

“As the pursuit of science is increasingly conducted in a digital world, we need policies that ensure that the opportunities the Internet presents for new research tools and techniques to be employed can be fully exploited. The removal of access barriers and the enabling of expanded use of research findings has the potential to dramatically transform how we approach issues of vital importance to the public, such as biomedicine, climate change, and energy research. As scientists, and as taxpayers too, we support FRPAA and urge its passage.”

The bi-partisan Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), introduced by Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX), would deliver online public access to the published results of research funded through eleven U.S. agencies and departments, requiring that peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from publicly funded research be made available in an online repository no later than six months after publication.

The Nobelists note that enabling access to this information would be an important contribution in fostering innovation and fueling positive economic and social returns:

“The open availability of federally funded research for broad public use in open online archives is a crucial building block in laying a strong national foundation to support accelerated discovery and innovation.  It encourages broader participation in the scientific process by providing equitable access to high-quality research results to researchers at higher education institutions of all kinds – from research-intensive universities to community colleges alike. It can empower more members of the public to become engaged in citizen science efforts in areas that pique their imagination. It will equip entrepreneurs and small business owners with the very latest research developments, allowing them to more effectively compete in the development of new technologies and innovations.  Open availability of this research will expand the worldwide visibility of the research conducted in the U.S. and increase the impact of our collective investment in research.”

The full text of the letter is online at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/supporters/scientists.

The Federal Research Public Access Act would build upon the success of the first U.S. requirement for public access to publicly funded research, through the National Institutes of Health. It is widely supported by a broad set of stakeholders, including: scientists, higher education leaders, librarians, consumer and economic groups (including the Committee on Economic Development), technology companies (including Amazon.com, Ask.com, Bloomberg, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and state and local ISPs), publishers, patients and patient advocates, and major national and regional research organizations. For full details on support for the Act, visit http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access calls on organizations and individuals to write in support of the bill through the Web site at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

For more information about the Federal Research Public Access Act, visit http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of advocacy, academic, research, and publishing organizations that supports open public access to the results of federally funded research. The Alliance was formed in 2004 to urge that peer-reviewed articles stemming from taxpayer-funded research become fully accessible and available online at no extra cost to the American public. Details on the ATA may be found at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/)
ADHO - Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/)
CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/)
centerNet (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/centernet/)
DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu/)                                                                                                                                                               NoC - Network of Expert Centres in Great Britain and Ireland (http://www.arts-humanities.net/noc/)
Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/)
TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de/)

The group identified the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies as a barrier to fully exploiting the transformative role that these technologies can potentially play. It was resolved that the group’s present, proposed, and future activities are interdependent and complementary and should be oriented towards working together to overcome barriers, and to create a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.

In order to achieve these goals the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks – CHAIN was formed. CHAIN will act as a forum for areas of shared interest to its participants, including:
-      advocacy for an improved  digital research infrastructure for the Humanities;
-      development of sustainable business models;
-      promotion of technical interoperability of resources, tools and services;
-      promotion of good practice and relevant technical standards;
-      development of a shared service infrastructure;
-      coordinating approaches to legal and ethical issues;
-      interactions with other relevant computing infrastructure initiatives;
-      widening the geographical scope of our coalition.

CHAIN will promote an open culture where experiences, including successes and failures, can be shared and discussed, in order to support and promote the use of digital technologies in research in the Humanities.

Sheila Anderson, King’s College, London (DARIAH)
Andreas Aschenbrenner, State and University Library Göttingen (TextGrid, DARIAH)
David Greenbaum, University of California, Berkeley (Project Bamboo)
Seth Denbo, King’s  College, London (DARIAH)
Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland (centerNet)
Chad Kainz, University of Chicago (Project Bamboo)
Steven Krauwer, Utrecht University (CLARIN)
Lorna Hughes, King’s  College, London (ADHO, NoC)
Tobias Blanke, King’s College, London (DARIAH)
Torsten Reimer, King’s  College, London (arts-humanities.net)
David Robey, University of Oxford (NoC)
Harold Short, King’s  College, London  (ADHO)
Katherine Walter, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (centerNet)
Peter Wittenburg, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (CLARIN)
Martin Wynne, University of Oxford (CLARIN, DARIAH)

“We are at a time of extraordinary technological and social change, which we need to implement systems and services capable of supporting 21 st century teaching, learning, research and scholarship. Our goal was to find the right technology vendor to help us build a cost-effective and expandable system to support Columbia’s growing digital collections,” said Robert Cartolano, Director, Library Info Tech Office. “Sun Microsystems provided everything we needed in one place. We were very impressed with their technology model, their commitment to open source and open systems, and their extensive experience in large-scale storage.”

Columbia’s integration of the SAM technology, a combination of StorEdge 6140, 4500 and L500 tape storage media technologies, along with Fedora Commons Repository Software from duraspace.org (an open source project) allows it to remotely locate and manage digital artifacts on three tiers of storage in geographically disparate locations for long-term content preservation. The system was designed with the ability to grow to half a petabyte (500,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information. Columbia is initially using the system to support its institutional repository, located at academiccommons.columbia.edu, and preservation of digital files from existing and upcoming digital library projects.

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.