Professional Development

On Wednesday, Barry, Jean-Paul, and Erik attended a Sun Webinar that focused on new advances in Dspace and Fedora. Both products have upcoming releases in the fall of 2009. Of note, the Dspace product (1.6) will have an integrated Embargo feature and will support batch metadata processing.

The Fedora presentation included a short overview of OSGi, a development framework which focuses on a modular service oriented architecture. Both presentations included references to DuraSpace, a new cloud based archiving service developed in conjunction with the duraspace community.

After the Sun webinar we spent a while learning more about DuraCloud in a separate webinar sponsored by the DuraSpace community. Michele Kimpton (CBO of DuraSpace) and Bill Branan (Senior developer for DuraSpace) presented on developments in DuraCloud.

DuraCloud uses cloud computing technology to provide hosted digital library services and replicated storage across multiple cloud systems. The presentation included a number of architecture images but one in particular did a good job showing how DuraCloud will provide services in a cloud environment.

The service will support archiving as well as instance hosting. Some of the initial services they are looking at providing include kultura, dpsace, fedora, taxon-finder, jhove, and lockss. Right now DuraCloud has two pilot partners but hopefully the service will be opened for more participants soon!

On Monday, Erik led a short class on the process for submitting to WakeSpace for library staff. The class focused on the elements to gather prior to submission and the hands-on task of actually submitting the work.

As part of the class a wiki page on submitting items to WakeSpace was developed that covers the details of how to obtain copyright permissions, how to decide what to upload, and the process for creating an account and uploading your documents. If you have suggestions for improvements to the page feel free to go edit!

If you have questions about how to submit or what qualifies, feel free to get in touch with Erik or Barry and one of us will help you through the process. We will be offering another session in early September as well.