DuraSpace

From Karla Strieb, Association of Research Libraries

Washington DC The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published “Digital Curation for Preservation,” the first report in its new series, New Roles for New Times.

http://www.arl.org/news/pr/nrnt-dcreport17mar11.shtml

Washington, DC Eight international research funders are jointly announcing their participation in round two of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to spur cutting edge research in the humanities and social sciences.

From Bonnie Wilson, D-Lib Magazine

The March/April 2011 issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now available.

This issue contains five articles and two conference reports. Also in this issue you can find the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'. This month, D-Lib features the Galaxy of Images collection courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

The articles include:

From Neil Fraistat, Professor of English & Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH),
University of Maryland

Ithaca, NY DuraSpace, a leading provider of open source tools to help organizations ensure their digital content is durable and usable, announces the release of an updated version of DuraCloud Open Source (0.8) with improvements for managing content in the cloud.

From Alice Specht, ALC Council Chair, Dean of Libraries, Hardin-Simmons University

Abilene, Texas The West Texas Digital Archives, an online digital repository of significant historical materials belonging to the members of the Abilene Library Consortium (ALC), is now available online at http://wtda.alc.org/.  This virtual collection of more than 44,000 preserves and provides access to valuable historical resources previously unavailable to the general public.

From Tom Cramer, OR11 Program Chair

The Fedora committers are now in the final month of wrapping up Fedora 3.5, scheduled for release at the end of March 2011. This release focuses on several "under the hood" changes that improve the service's ability to be integrated and tested as part of larger repository systems and sets the stage for a full move to Spring-based pluggability and configuration. Several of the most popular issues will also be addressed in this release, including dropping the requirement to use DBXML if you elect to use FeSL for policy enforcement.

In our weekly developers meeting, the DSpace Committers decided to tentatively schedule the DSpace 1.7.1 (bug-fix only) release for March 25, 2011. Peter Dietz of Ohio State University Libraries will coordinate this minor release.