TierraCloud has launched the HC2 Open Source Project. HC2 has a Fedora Repository plug-in.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Web2.0s have invented a new storage architecture that runs on industry standard x86 servers using sophisticated software to create extremely reliable and scalable storage systems. This architecture, that may be called Private Cloud Storage, is so compelling that enterprises will have no option but to use it. Although enterprise storage architectures have been fairly stable since the mid 80’s with external block and file storage, TierraCloud expects these architectures will undergo a sea-change in the next decade.

"Current mainstream solutions are ill-suited to address new private cloud storage requirements" said Sriram Rupanagunta, founder of TierraCloud. "Acquisition cost, management cost, scalability and reliability are the key requirements. With HC2’s unique advantages in the areas of automated data management, extreme data mobility, and ability to run third-party storage apps, the total-cost-of-ownership will get slashed by 10x." . . .

"It has become clear that data curation will require distributed storage and application frameworks," said Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean of University Libraries at Johns Hopkins University. "No single institution can develop the comprehensive, necessary infrastructure to preserve and provide access to the large amount of data being generated by all disciplines ranging from the sciences to the humanities. HC2's emphasis on hardware choices, geographically distributed data and open-source software is compelling. Most institutions will be eager to experiment with private cloud storage and HC2 represents a useful option in this regard."

JISC has released SWORD v2.0: Deposit Lifecycle.

Here's an excerpt:

SWORD is a hugely successful JISC project which has kindled repository interoperability and built a community around the software and the problem space. It explicitly deals only with creating new repository resources by package deposit a simple case which is at the root of its success but also its key limitation. This next version of SWORD will push the standard towards supporting full repository deposit lifecycles by using update, retrieve and delete extensions to the specification. This will enable the repository to be integrated into a broader range of systems in the scholarly environment, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases.

DuraSpace has announced its new Registered Service Provider Program.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, the DuraSpace not-for-profit organization announced its new Registered Service Provider Program to establish partnerships with companies that provide support services to institutions using the DSpace and Fedora digital repository software.

The new program will establish an network of service providers offering a range of services including customer support, technical consulting, software development, and systems integration. The program will benefit universities, libraries, museums, research institutions, and others that require support in building or maintaining repository-based systems built with DSpace, Fedora, and related open source and commercial technologies.

Registered Service Providers will be easily identified. They will be featured on the DuraSpace web site (duraspace.org) and relevant project websites, with contact information and a profile of their service offerings. Providers will also exhibit their affiliation with DuraSpace by displaying the special DuraSpace Service Provider Logo on their marketing materials and websites.

Registered Service Providers share the DuraSpace commitment to ensuring that current and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage. Service Providers are active participants in open source software communities and are committed to providing expertise and technical consulting to enable customers to achieve their goals with open technologies.

The BibApp development team has released BibApp 1.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

BibApp is a campus research gateway and expert finder. It matches researchers on your campus or research center with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations, create visualizations of areas of research, and find experts in research areas. With BibApp, it is easy to see what publications can be placed on the Web for greater access and impact. BibApp can push those publications directly into an institutional repository.

BibApp allows researchers and research groups to promote research, find collaborators on campus, and make research more accessible. It also allows libraries to better understand research happening in local departments, facilitate conversations about author rights with researchers, and ease the population of the institutional repository. Finally, BibApp allows campus administrators to achieve a clearer picture of collaboration and scholarly publishing trends on campus.

BibApp is the result of a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois (https://www.informatics.illinois.edu/icubed/) provided generous funding for the development of the 1.0 release of BibApp.

BibApp is a Ruby on Rails application, coupled with the Solr/Lucene search engine, and either MySQL or PostgreSQL as its datastore. It uses open standards and protocols such as OpenURL and SWORD and automatically pulls in data from third party sources such as Google Books and the Sherpa/Romeo publisher policy database. BibApp imports publication data in RIS, MEDLINE and Refworks XML bibliography formats and exports data in several citation formats (APA, Chicago, IEEE, MLA, more) via CiteProc. BibApp also provides a web services API for delivering data as XML, YML, JSON, and RDF. BibApp is released under a University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.php).

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has had over 37.4 million downloads.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

2010 is our 16th year and it is off to a great start. Our eLibrary (http://ssrn.com/search) has delivered over 37.4 million downloads to date and grown to 290,000 documents and 138,000 authors—increases over the last year of 53,000 and 22,000 respectively. Our CiteReader technology, developed with ITX Corp, has captured over 6 million references, 5.7 million footnotes, and close to 3.9 million citation links.

Dan S. Wallach, Associate Professor at Rice University's Department of Computer Science, has made an eprint of "Rebooting the CS Publication Process" available.

Here's an excerpt:

Many computer science academics have been grousing about failures in our publication process. This paper catalogs many of the specific complaints that are raised and proposes some radical new solutions based on the assumption that, by eliminating physical paper entirely and going with a centralized system to manage papers, we can rethink the entire process: paper submission, revision and publication. Furthermore, having all of the metadata standardized and easily available, ranking algorithms can be easily conceived to aid in tenure cases and departmental rankings.

RIAN, Ireland’s national open access portal, has been launched by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Ireland’s new national portal for Open Access to Irish published research goes live today. RIAN – http://www.rian.ie will act as a single point of access to national research output, and contains content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish Universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

A national network of institutional repositories will increase the exposure of national research output, and allows services, such as enhanced searching, and statistics generation, to be developed using economies of scale. RIAN will demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.

The Irish Government has identified growth in research as critical to its future as a knowledge economy. Raising the research profile is a key strategy in the Universities’ strategic plans, and the ability to showcase research output and identify institutional research strengths is extremely important in attracting new funding and high quality staff.

The development of RIAN was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group and is supported by the Association. This three year project was equally funded by the Universities and the Irish Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority.

Presentations from the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries 2010 are now available.

Here's some representative presentations:

• Directions for Digital Repositories, Leslie Carr
• Preservation Network at TDL, Peter Nürnberg
• Texas Digital Library Update 2010, Mark McFarland and John Leggett
• Texas Learning Object Repository, Junius Rowland and Otto Fox
• Vireo ETD Submission and Management System—Update 2010, Peter Nürnberg

Stuart Lewis has announced that a multiple-deposit function has been added to the EasyDeposit SWORD client.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

For those of you unfamiliar with EasyDeposit, it is an online tool that allows you to configure your own SWORD client. It is intended that you run multiple copies of EasyDeposit and configure each for a specific tailored use, such as thesis deposit, journal deposit, multiple deposit etc. The deposit process is made up of a set of 'steps' which you can configure and change into a preferred order to make your chosen client. . . .

The new multiple deposit functionality allows the administrator to 'hard code' the details of a set of repositories, and upon completion of the deposit process the item is deposited into each of those repositories. EasyDeposit has been designed with extensibility in mind, so if you wish to write your own 'steps,' for example to allow the depositor to select which repositories from a given list they would like to deposit into, this is easy and straightforward to write in PHP.

DuraSpace has released DSpace 1.6.1.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

DSpace 1.6.1 is primarily a bug-fix release, which means it does not introduce any new features but improves existing features and fixes bugs discovered in earlier versions of DSpace. This is also the first [minor] version of DSpace to use a “time-driven” approach to release, rather than a “feature-driven” approach: we set a deadline and worked towards releasing on that date, instead of releasing when a certain number of issues were resolved. DSpace 1.7 will be the first major time-driven release.