Humanities

Washington, DC Less than one week from today, more than 200 sites around the globe will mark Open Access Week 2009. The concept of Open Access is based on the simple idea that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. Research institutes, colleges, universities, and advocacy organizations everywhere will host events or wear buttons to express their support for free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research.

Ithaca, NY The very active, global, Fedora Commons Repository community of software developers contribute to the core software development process. In addition they also develop complete applications on top of Fedora that address particular use cases or application areas. The “Getting Started with Fedora” Guide is designed to offer new users, or potential users, a basic understanding of the Fedora architecture and the core repository management software, along with some general ideas about how to use it.

Baltimore, MD The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) i2 Working Group surveyed repository managers and developers to determine the current practices and needs of the repository community regarding institutional identifiers. Results from the survey will inform a set of use cases that will be shared with the community, and that are expected to drive the development of a new standard for institutional identifiers.

Edinburgh, UK The Repository Fringe Festival was held from July 30-31 and was attended by repository managers and developers from the UK and beyond. The event, sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and hosted by Edinburgh University’s school of Informatics, was informal and the agenda was definitely “unconference” style. Presentations focusing on hybrid paper/digital deposit repository systems and streamlined scholarly workflows were presented by attendees who had self-selected to be part of the RFF program.

Oxford, UK After the successful Fedora-EU meeting in Aarhus, September last year, we invite you to join us this year in Oxford, on December 8, 2009. Numerous people were calling for this event, and we are particularly grateful for the support of Fedora-UK&I and the local team in Oxford (http://www.dresnet.net) who are sponsors of the meeting.To minimize travel, particularly for international participants, the meeting is set to coincide with:

San Francisco, CA The Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) meeting will be taking place October 7-9, 2009 in San Francisco. Thought-leaders and solution providers in the areas of data curation, data management of eScience content, preservation, repositories, and storage technologies will be presenting Wednesday and Thursday. Collaborative working groups are scheduled on Friday.

Lisbon, Portugal Source code is now available from RODA, Repositório de Objectos Digitais Autênticos, an initiative of the National Archive Institute of Portugal (IAN/TT) supported by the eGovernment of Portugal which has been established to support its activity in information and communication technologies to improve the efficiency, productivity and quality of public services.

College Station, Texas Repositories are being deployed in a variety of environments (education, research, science, cultural heritage) and contexts (national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal).  Regardless of setting, context or scale, repositories are increasingly expected to operate across administrative and disciplinary boundaries and to interact with distributed computational services and social communities.  The many repository platforms available today are changing the nature of scholarly communication.