[Dspace-general] Next N.A. User Group Meeting?

[MacKenzie Smith]

Hi Shawna,

>Are there any plans to hold a North American DSpace user group meeting
>in the near future?

Yes, there's a plan afoot to hold a DSpace user group meeting as part of the
Open Repository 2007 meeting in San Antonio, Texas next January. See
http://openrepositories.org/

The Open Repository conference concept was pioneered by the University of
Sydney and the Australian National University last winter, and it went very
well...  the idea is to have user group meetings for major open source 
repository
platforms (currently DSpace, Fedora, and EPrints) followed by a general
meeting on platform-independent topics. The focus is mainly on the technology
however, as opposed to policy/marketing kinds of presentations. Open
Repository 2008 (OR2008) is already scheduled to be held at the University
of Southampton, UK -- the idea is to alternate between North America and
Europe every other year.

If you look at the draft program you'll see that we have one and a half days
set aside for a DSpace user group meeting at the beginning of the conference,
followed by 2 days for the general conference. We see if that's enough time
for everything!

I've also heard from the folks at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, that they
might be interested in hosting a user group meeting in 2008, or possibly
OR2009, so it is my sincere hope that we can have at least one DSpace
user group meeting in North America each year starting in 2007. There will
undoubtedly be user group meetings in other parts of the world as well, but
I realize that there hasn't been one in North American since 2003 so we're
next on the list.

MacKenzie


MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building E25-131d
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu