[Dspace-general] DSpace and Fedora Commons form working collaboration
Michele Kimpton
michele at dspace.org
Tue Jul 29 09:09:27 EDT 2008
Dear members of the community (apologize for cross posting)-
DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons officially announced our
collaboration to work together today to clearly communicate to our
communities the intent and spirit of the collaboration. I look
forward to all of your input, feedback and involvement. Please do not
hesitate to contact me if you have questions, and I have started a
forum on the website where you can post ideas, comments, concerns, and
possible projects in regard to the collaboration. Go to http://www.dspace.org/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=241
and post under DSpace Fedora collaboration. You must register on the
website to do this, but all you need is an email.
Michele Kimpton
July 29, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Sandy Payette, Executive Director Fedora Commons, 607
255-2773, spayette at fedora-commons.org
Michele Kimpton, Executive Director DSpace
Foundation, 617 253-7746, michele at dspace.org
DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Form Working Collaboration
Washington, D.C.—July 29, 2008 Today two of the largest providers of
open source software for managing and providing access to digital
content, the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons, announced plans to
combine strengths to work on joint initiatives that will more closely
align their organizations’ goals and better serve both open source
repository communities in the coming months.
This advance comes as institutions such as universities, libraries,
museums and research laboratories worldwide are focused on utilizing
open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation
of scholarly, scientific, and cultural heritage digital content into
the future. Making books, articles, films, music, large and small data
sets, scholarly works, multi-media, learning objects and mash-ups from
all parts of the globe discoverable and accessible is at the core of
the DSpace and Fedora collaboration.
The collaboration is expected to benefit over 500 organizations from
around the world who are currently using either DSpace (examples
include MIT, Rice University, Texas Digital Library and University of
Toronto) or Fedora (examples include the National Library of France,
New York Public Library, Encyclopedia of Chicago and eSciDoc) open
source software to create repositories for a wide variety of purposes.
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) director Clifford Lynch
remarked, "Repositories are a key part of the infrastructure for
supporting scholarly work, and they need to integrate more effectively
with a range of other evolving components. I think there are great
opportunities for DSpace and Fedora to work together not only on
repository interoperability but on common approaches to repository
roles in the scholarly and scientific workflows."
The decision to collaborate came out of meetings held this spring
where members of DSpace and Fedora Commons communities discussed
multiple dimensions of cooperation and collaboration between the two
organizations. Ideas included leveraging the power and reach of open
source knowledge communities by using the same services and standards
in the future. The organizations will also explore opportunities to
provide new capabilities for accessing and preserving digital content,
developing common web services, and enabling interoperability across
repositories.
In the spirit of advancing open source software, Fedora Commons and
DSpace will look at ways to leverage and incubate ideas, community and
culture to:
1. Provide the best technology and services to open source repository
framework communities.
2. Evaluate and synchronize, where possible, both organizations’
technology roadmaps to enable convergence and interoperability of key
architectural components.
3. Demonstrate how the DSpace and Fedora open source repository
frameworks offer a unique value proposition compared to proprietary
solutions.
The announcement came on the heels of an event sponsored by the Joint
Information Systems Committee’s (JISC) Common Repository Interface
Group (CRIG) held at the Library of Congress. The event, known as
“RepoCamp,” was a forum where developers gathered to discuss
innovative approaches to improving interoperability and web-
orientation for digital repositories. Sandy Payette, Executive
Director of Fedora Commons, and Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of
the DSpace Foundation, reiterated their commitment to collaboration
and encouraged input and participation from both communities as work
gets underway.
About the DSpace Foundation
The DSpace Foundation (http://dspace.org/) was formed in 2007 to
support to the growing global community of institutions using DSpace
open source software to manage scholarly works in a digital archive.
DSpace was jointly developed in 2002 by HP and the MIT Libraries.
Today, there are over more than 350 organizations worldwide a using
the software to capture, preserve and share their artifacts,
documents, collections and research data. To learn more about the
DSpace community of users see: http://www.dspace.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=596&Itemid=182
About Fedora Commons
In 2007 Fedora Commons (http://fedora-commons.org/) was established as
the permanent home of Fedora open source software which is a robust,
integrated, repository platform that enables storage, access and
management of virtually any kind of digital content. Fedora has been
downloaded 25,000 times in the last year, and is used by over 125
national libraries, institutions, and businesses worldwide to do more
with their digital collections, enable long-term preservation of
digital assets, build on a flexible and extensible, modular
architecture, keep control of their data, and participate in Fedora’s
innovative community. To find out about Fedora organizations,
institutions and projects see: http://fedora.info/wiki/index.php/Fedora_Commons_Community_Registry
.
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