Open Repository Blog
Information World Review Article
Posted by Dominic Tate at 16:02 Comments (0)
Next week, Graham and I will be travelling over to Rome for the next DSpace User Group meeting. It's going to be tough but we do this so you don't have to! Alongside various presentations from DSpace developers working on local projects there will be updates on the work that was done in the Google Summer of Code, especially of interest will be the updated statistics package, and updates on what's happening with the DSpace Foundation and the move towards DSpace 2.
We'll be away from Tuesday till the end of the week and when we're back I'll be able to give you an update as to what's been happening, and what's going to be happening in the DSpaceiverse.
Posted by Mark Merifield at 10:53 Comments (0)
JISC and the Repositories Support Project are holding a DSpace technical day at the University of Bath on Monday 12th November' and Graham, our technical architect and one of the DSpace committers will be giving a presentation there.
Pasted in below is the information from the email just sent through to the DSpace JISC list by Chris Yates, repository suport officer at Aberystwyth.
"The JISC Repositories Support Project will be holding a
DSpace Technical Day at the University of Bath on Monday 12th November 2007
aimed at repository administrators, technical support staff and developers. The
day will consist of two strands (participants will be free to move between
each):
1. Introduction to DSpace System
2. Metadata & Schema Management
3. Submission system configuration (submission.xml,
input-forms.xml)
4. Understanding the workflow system
5. Search & browsing system configuration
6. Introduction to development
7. CRON & utility scripts (batch import,
etc.)
1. Advanced installation (LDAP,
Multilingualism/Internationalisation, Security[DSpace over HTTPS])
2. Handles/Persistent identification
3. Storage abstraction in DSpace
4. Lucene Search
6. DSpace & Manakin
7. Configurable Browse/Submission
8. Addon/Event Mechanism/Maven
Chris"
Posted by Mark Merifield at 11:37 Comments (0)
Latest addition to the Committer Group
From: dspace-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net; on behalf of; Robert Tansley
Hi all,
The committer group is pleased to announce the addition of a new member, Graham Triggs from BioMed Central.
Graham has been a very active member of the DSpace technical community, on the lists and on the IRC channel, and has made numerous bug reports and code contributions. He was also involved in the architecture review process. Hence we feel he's a natural addition to our group.
We're also excited to have BioMed Central, one of the first commercial organisations to invest in DSpace and offer services based on the platform, represented in the committer group.
Please join me in welcoming Graham!
Rob on behalf of the DSpace committers
NOTE: The DSpace Committer Group is responsible for applying the various fixes, patches and new functionality to the core DSpace code and organising the new releases. Having Graham, our technical architect, invited to be a committer is not only a great compliment to his work but also further strengthens our relationship with the DSpace Foundation and is excellent news for all parties.
Posted by Mark Merifield at 10:27 Comments (0)
An introduction to the DSpace foundation
Last week the team headed off in a south westerly direction to the somewhat sumptuous surroundings of Hewlett Packard labs in Bristol; the venue for third UK & Ireland DSpace User Group meeting. Along with the opportunity to catch up on some local goings on in the DSpace universe it was also an opportunity to meet up with Michele Kimpton, the newly appointed Executive Director for the newly formed DSpace foundation. The idea behind the foundation is to create a non-profit corporation that will supply organizational, legal and financial support to the DSpace software project.
Now that's great news for us and great news for DSpace. Michele's appointment will provide a much needed centre of focus for the community, both in terms of communication and support. When (almost) everyone working on a project is doing so voluntarily it's inevitable that it's the organisational ball that usually gets dropped in favour of simply getting things done. My hope is that the foundation will not only drive the former but also add structure and guidance to the latter. This will be most apparent through the appointment of a Chief Technical Officer to lead and project manage the development of the long awaited DSpace 2.0 through 2008.
There's obviously a great deal to do and although the foundation now officially exists as a legal entity (with BioMed Central's Publisher, Matt Cockerill sitting on the board of directors) it will be a while yet before the organisational structures start to fall into place. In the mean time it's good to know that DSpace is getting the support it deserves and that we'll be playing as important a role as we can in making it happen.
If you're interested in further details Michele's presentation to the group is available here.
Posted by Mark Merifield at 17:14 Comments (0)
One of the major projects happening within the DSpace community at the moment is the Google Summer of Code; essentially Google sponsor a number of student developers to work on various open source projects over the summer. DSpace have five projects in the running.
Two things we've been asked about many times have been the import of citation information from bibliographic reference managers such as EndNote and improved statistics. Both are included within GSOC. That means both import from and export to the most common citation software packages and a vastly improved stats package. In the mean time we're also looking at rolling out Google Analytics but more of that later.
Another nifty tool looks to be the visualisation aspect for Manakin. Manakin is the new DSpace interface, replacing the old JSP layout with XML. It's going to be a while before we're ready to take on the full Manakin integration but the ability to add maps, graphs and timelines as a way of visualising the repository content sounds like a nice step in the right direction to improving some of the user functions.
Lastly there are two projects looking at broadly preservational aspects: versioning and content integrity. Versioning support for items is another good tool that's been lacking from the list so far and the content integrity checker will do just that - ensure that files within the system have not been altered and if they have, then when.
GSOC wraps at the end of August and it shouldn't be too long before the code is made available and is implemented within OR.
Posted by Mark Merifield at 12:41 Comments (0)