• Dspace Futures: http://duraspace.org/dspace-futures. Towards the end of 2012, DuraSpace organized a series of phone calls with the DSpace community. Sponsors, DCAT members, committers, and service providers participated in one of five meetings scheduled to survey current community perceptions of DSpace. Altogether approximately 53 people joined in on the calls, representing 32 organizations. Participants responded to questions such as whether DSpace was currently meeting the needs of their organization, in what ways was it being used, what were the biggest challenges encountered, and what changes or enhancements were most requested. This paper presents the findings from those discussions.

 

  • Fedora Futures: http://www.duraspace.org/fedora%E2%80%94-repository-future-new-fedora-initiative-underway A group of stakeholders from the Fedora community have come together to begin the process of planning a three year software development project that will direct new resources toward a major Fedora overhaul, adding capabilities that will make Fedora the repository platform of choice for the future.  The group anticipates that improvements will include features such as greater scalability, data management support, storage flexibility, and others the community has been requesting. This new initiative is being called Fedora Futures.

 

  • Adams, Sam, and Peter Murray-Rust. “Chempound—A Web 2.0-Inspired Repository for Physical Science Data.” Journal of Digital Information 13, no. 1 (2012). http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/5873
    “Chempound is a new generation repository architecture based on RDF, semantic dictionaries and linked data. The Chempound architecture is general and adaptable to other fields of data-rich science. Repositories seem to be an obvious location for integrating and exploring data, but the primary focus of most existing repositories is growing and preserving their collections, and too little attention is paid to their usability. Our experiences promoting the publication of scientific data and engaging with communities of data producers have shown us that scientists will only deal with domain repositories that are trivial to use and understand the scientists’ data. This requires specialist, per-discipline tools. Such activities require a large investment to develop, but if we want data rich communities to engage with repositories then we need to address their needs. Repositories can be much more than archives or museums, but their focus needs to change”

 

  • The CLIF Project: The Repository as Part of a Content Lifecycle. Richard Green, Chris Awre, Simon Waddington. Ariadne. 9 March 2012. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue68/green-et-al This was a joint project that did an extensive literature review and worked with  digital content creators to understand how to deal with the interaction of the authoring, collaboration and delivery of materials. At the heart of meeting institutional requirements for managing digital content is the need to understand the different operations through which content goes, from planning and creation through to disposal or preservation. Repositories must be integrated with the other systems that support other parts of this lifecycle to prevent them becoming yet another information silo within the institution.The CLIF software has been designed to try and allow the maximum flexibility in how and when users can transfer material from one system to another, integrating the tools in such a way that they seem to be natural extensions of the basic systems.  This open source software is available for others to investigate and use. The repository’s archival capability is regarded as one of its strongest assets, and the role of the repository within a University will be regarded very much in terms of what it can offer that other campus systems cannot.  It should not try to compete on all levels. There is a need to clarify better at an institutional level what functionality is offered by different content management systems, in order to better understand how different stages of the digital content lifecycle can be best enabled.