Yes, I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted any updates. We haven’t really had anything major to announce for a while – lots of tweaks to existing repositories, and one or two new pilots. Although there are a couple of larger projects happening in the background, which should become visible shortly.

As I write this, I am sat on a train to Edinburgh – where for the rest of the week I shall be attending the repository world’s latest conference, the Repository Fringe. Any suggestions that the timing and venue of this meetup have been chosen for the various social activities available are emphatically refuted!

I will take this opportunity to mention a significant upgrade that was made a few weeks ago – the introduction of an enhanced server infrastructure. I’ll spare the gory details, but it means that we can better distribute the requests to our hosted repositories across the servers we are running. So whilst we haven’t introduced any new hardware, we have effectively doubled the peak capacity that the servers can handle.

What’s more, because user login information is replicated across the servers, when a server fails or the software it is running is upgraded, any users that are logged in will no longer find themselves mysteriously logged out.

All of which is good news for the managers and users of our hosted repositories, and quite noteworthy to the wider DSpace community as very few institutes run a fully clustered repository (I had to fix one or two minor issues in the main DSpace code to even make this possible – these fixes will be part of the upcoming 1.5.1 release).