[Dspace-general] DSpace Federation User Group Meeting, March 10-11, 2004

[MacKenzie Smith]

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   DSpace Federation User Group Meeting Announcement and Call for Presentations
   Cambridge, Massachusetts 10-11 March 2004
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Over the past year the DSpace digital repository system, the open source 
software system originally developed by Hewlett-Packard and MIT,  has been 
adopted for use by many organizations world wide. As this group of research 
institutions and other organizations has grown, the need for a forum to 
come together and share experiences, ideas, and concerns has become highly 
desirable. To initiate this, MIT will host a first-ever user group meeting 
of the DSpace Federation in March to help build connections among the 
adopter community and to discuss the future of the group.

The DSpace Federation user group meeting will be held at MIT, in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, on Wednesday March 10 and Thursday March 11, 2004.

The meeting website includes additional information and will be updated 
frequently in the coming months:

   <http://www.dspace.org/federation/conference.html/>

Registration will be open to all, with a registration fee of $185 per 
person. Online registration at the meeting website will be available by 
February 1, 2004.

The objective of the DSpace Federation meeting is to bring together the 
research and other communities to share experiences and discuss the future 
developments of the DSpace platform and Federation of adopters. There will 
be presentations on current and future work being done on the DSpace 
platform by a variety of organizations, applications of the technology in 
specific organizational contexts, and discussion of future governance and 
maintenance options to ensure the platform's timeliness, usability, 
openness, and future success. In addition to presentations by the HP and 
MIT DSpace teams about upcoming releases and future plans, there will be 
keynote presentations from Google and Open Source Software experts.

We are issuing a Call for Presentations by organizations using DSpace who 
have innovative or educational uses of the platform to share with the 
community, or others who have proposals for how to leverage the DSpace 
platform for its main preservation and access goals. Presentation proposals 
should be sent via email to the meeting organizers (email address below) 
and should take the form of brief (1 page) descriptions of the topic for 
presentation. All presentations will be approximately 30 minutes. 
Submissions are requested  by January 31, 2004 and will be reviewed by 
members of the DSpace Federation project 
(http://dspace.org/federation/project.html) for acceptance notification by 
February 13, 2004.

Further information can be obtained from the MIT organizers:

MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology
Julie Walker, Senior Business Strategist
Richard Rodgers, DSpace Federation Systems Manager
Email: dspace-meeting at mit.edu


Many thanks,

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA