One bug and two fixes to go

Mark Merifield on September 19, 2007 at 12:21 pm - 0 Comments

That’s right readers, we’re down to our last bug – the document conversion tool has unconfigured itself – and two final small changes to the interface. We’ve been terminating our bugs with extreme prejudice with five coming off the list yesterday and expect these final fixes to be finished by the end of today. All being well we should be in a position to declare the release ‘stable’ tomorrow.

Friday we’ll all be out of the office on a company training away day and so the public test site won’t be available until next week now. There will of course be an announcement as soon as it is.

Customer surveys and what happens next; a post in two parts – part 1

Mark Merifield on September 19, 2007 at 5:18 am - 0 Comments

It’s been a few months now since our initial Open Repository
customer surveys, so hopefully it’s not too late to thank everyone who took
part. We released three surveys: one
for set up processes and communication, one looking at user features and one
looking at admin features. Each one asked for comments about how things are now
and suggestions for what could happen in the future.

For my own part, I’m especially happy to be able to say that
on the whole the results from the first survey were very positive. Most of the
comments were related directly to the ‘weightiness’ of the support
documentation, an issue we’re addressing as we rewrite the manuals and guides
for …

1.4.1 release update – where we are now

Mark Merifield on September 17, 2007 at 12:24 pm - 0 Comments

When things are quiet here it usually means that we’re all pretty busy. Either that or on holiday. But for now we’re just plain busy. The last two months have seen the team working hard to complete the upgrade to DSpace 1.4.1 and we’re very close to being able to make the test site publicly available.

Firstly there’s been the somewhat onerous task of translating much of our old code into the new format; that’s now done. At the same time we’ve been cleaning up the design along the way, improving as much as we can within the limitations of the current layout and that’s almost complete; should be finished in a day or so. We’ve also been tinkering with the …

SHERPA’s repository staff and skills document

Mark Merifield on August 28, 2007 at 11:22 am - 0 Comments

SHERPA have just released their skills set and description of the common repository roles
needed to develop and manage a successful institutional repository.

There’s a handy disclaimer just in case anyone starts to get a little depressed as they try to tick off every point on the list:

The document is not designed to describe the skills set required of a particular
repository post but rather is a list of the entire set of skills, knowledge
and abilities required for the development and management of a successful
institutional repository.

Latest addition to the Committer Group

Mark Merifield on July 26, 2007 at 10:27 am - 0 Comments

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 …

Upgrading to 1.4.1 – some background

Mark Merifield on July 19, 2007 at 6:03 am - 1 Comment

Right, time to jot down some notes about what’s happening with this upgrade. We’ll start from the beginning, so first a word or few about DSpace (with apologies for the necessary repetition of facts many of you will already be aware of).

DSpace is the code that powers Open Repository. When BioMed Central decided to offer a repository hosting service back in 2004 the choice was to either take an existing software and make it our own or to build a service from scratch. And although it might occasionally have felt as if we’d taken the latter option, DSpace was the only logical choice. It was a good fit with our company skills set and hardware infrastructure. It had a …

S M L OR XL

Mark Merifield on July 17, 2007 at 2:30 am - 0 Comments

My original title for this post was going to be ‘Get your rocks off’ but I wasn’t sure how many of you would get the reference – it’s a line from a song by Primal Scream. Still, there are many things that rock / Rock: the ‘Scream for one, archiving (especially self-archiving) and our brand new OR t-shirts.

The shirts, the dependable all round Comfort T and women’s Continental Classic (pictured), have just been added to the BioMed Central collection and are now available in a variety of sizes in white and pink respectively with our ‘Archiving Rocks’ slogan on the front and the OR logo on the back.

And if simply having an OR t-shirt isn’t …

Sneak preview – the 1.4.1 home page

Mark Merifield on July 16, 2007 at 5:02 am - 0 Comments

Here’s a screengrab of the 1.4.1 release home page I’ve just pulled from our test site.

Servers, stats, a good end to the week

Mark Merifield on July 13, 2007 at 5:54 am - 0 Comments

As the sun sets on the week a moment’s reflection to see where we’ve got to. The move to the new severs was virtually seamless all things considered and all the sites were back up and running by midday after some necessary and expected last minute tweaking. It may not feel as if much has changed but we know we’re running on a much stronger platform and are far less likely to suffer some of the service drop outs of before: missing email alerts and the like. Talking of which the stats are back up, something we’ve had to wait for this move to fix.. The indexers are running nicely and it really should be smooth sailing from now on. …

An introduction to the DSpace foundation

Mark Merifield on July 11, 2007 at 5:14 am - 0 Comments

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 …