I was very excited to see that Information World Review has published an article about Open Repository (Issue 242, January 2008), but at the same time very disappointed to find some inaccuracies in it.

Unfortunately, the article was a little confusing, calling DSpace an ‘Internet Content Distributor’ and suggesting that we have only recently started to incorporate aspects of DSpace into Open Repository - far from it.  DSpace is something that provides the basic open source foundation for our service, and is a project we have been involved in from the start.

 
I was also disappointed to find that we had been misquoted in the article. Graham Triggs is very much actively involved in the technical direction of DSpace, going forwards. But that’s quite a way from being responsible for the strategic direction of DSpace, or even for …

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Next week,  Graham and I will be travelling over to Rome for the next DSpace User Group meeting.  It’s going to be tough but we do this so you don’t have to! Alongside various presentations from DSpace developers working on local projects there will be updates on the work that was done in the Google Summer of Code, especially of interest will be the updated statistics package, and updates on what’s happening with the DSpace Foundation and the move towards DSpace 2.

We’ll be away from Tuesday till the end of the week and when we’re back I’ll be able to give you an update as to what’s been happening, and what’s going to be happening in the DSpaceiverse.

JISC and the Repositories Support Project are holding a DSpace technical day at the University of Bath on Monday 12th November’ and Graham, our technical architect and one of the DSpace committers will be giving a presentation there.

Pasted in below is the information from the email just sent through to the DSpace JISC list by Chris Yates, repository suport officer at Aberystwyth.

"The JISC Repositories Support Project will be holding a
DSpace Technical Day at the University of Bath on Monday 12th November 2007
aimed at repository administrators, technical support staff and developers. The
day will consist of two strands (participants will be free to move between
each):

Strand 1 will consist of an open ‘surgery’ where you can
get …

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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 …

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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 …

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 One of the major projects happening within the DSpace community at the moment is the Google Summer of Code; essentially Google sponsor a number of student developers to work on various open source projects over the summer. DSpace have five projects in the running.  

Two things we’ve been asked about many times have been the import of citation information from bibliographic reference managers such as EndNote and improved statistics.  Both are included within GSOC.  That means both import from and export to the most common citation software packages and a vastly improved stats package.  In the mean time we’re also looking  at rolling out Google Analytics but more of that later.

Another nifty tool looks to be the …

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