DuraSpace has named Michele Kimpton as its Chief Executive Officer.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

DuraSpace, a not-for-profit organization providing open source software and services, announced today that Michele Kimpton will assume the role of Chief Executive Officer, effective March 1, 2011. Kimpton is currently the Chief Business Officer of DuraSpace, and formerly the Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation.

Kimpton will succeed current CEO, Sandy Payette, who will be entering a doctoral program at Cornell University to pursue a PhD and new research focused on the intersection of technology, society, and policy. Payette will continue to work with DuraSpace as strategic advisor to the Executive Team through June 2011. Brad McLean will continue in his current role on the Executive Team as Chief Technology Officer. . . .

Also effective March 1, 2011, Jonathan Markow will assume the newly created position of Chief Strategy Officer for DuraSpace. Markow brings years of experience in open source software strategy and community leadership. Most recently, Markow was the Executive Director of JASIG, a not-for-profit organization devoted to sponsoring and supporting open source software for higher education.

Kimpton was recently featured by the Library of Congress as a "Digital Preservation Pioneer" for her work in developing entrepreneurial, community-driven and culturally sensitive approaches to creating tools and strategies in support of digital archiving (http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/pioneers/detail_kimpton.html). Kimpton’s ability to create nimble technologies and solutions that are "out of the gate" quickly were especially noted. Kimpton says, "Get a version out into the world as soon as possible and refine it as you go along." She has a strong background in technology development in Asia and Europe bringing innovative open source business practices and technologies to DuraSpace global communities.

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There are now over 1,000 known DSpace repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the DuraSpace announcement

The DSpace user community has reached a major milestone. There are now over 1000 known instances of DSpace installed in almost 100 different countries worldwide. DSpace continues to be the most popular repository solution, with well over a third of the known institutional repositories using the DSpace software. Each month over the last year, the DSpace registry has added between 20-30 new repositories. Check out "Who's Using DSpace" to see the complete list. . . .

Over the last year, DSpace repositories were launched in 25 new countries, including: Bulgaria, Cameroon, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malawi, Malta, Mozambique, Nepal, Poland, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Senegal, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Tansania, Uruguay, Zambia.

The countries that had the largest increase in the number of DSpace repositories were: Japan +33, Taiwan +28, USA +16, Spain +13, Brazil +12, Ecuador +11, China +10, Portugal +10, Ukraine +10, South Africa +8, Thailand +7, Vietnam +7.

Also of interest is the number of highly ranked DSpace repositories listed in the January 2011 edition of the Ranking Web of World Repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the DuraSpace announcement

In overall, DSpace’s presence among the top 100 listed repositories has grown tremendously, with 51 repositories listed now, compared to 41 in July 2010, 45 in January 2010 and 43 in January 2009.

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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.

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.

Fedora Repository committers held a meeting at the Waterloo Campus of Kings College, London on February 23-24 of this year to discuss the software's future development. DuraSpace has released Chris Wilper's detailed summary of the meeting as well as presentations from it.

DSpace has released DSpace 1.6.0 demonstration repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The DSpace team announced today that an updated DSpace Demonstration Repository running DSpace 1.6.0 is now available for the community to use. The DSpace Demonstration Repository is a good place to run demonstrations, or to use as a sandbox for testing DSpace software before installing it. . . .

This demonstration site provides a sample repository with new DSpace 1.6.0 features enabled. This demonstration site also includes all DSpace interfaces (JSPUI, XMLUI, SWORD, OAI-PMH, LNI), connected to the same underlying database (so items created via XMLUI will also appear under JSPUI).

Also of interest: "screencast showing DSpace 1.6 authority control for author names and publishers from @mire.

DuraSpace has released What's New in Fedora 3.3 and DSpace 1.6.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On March 17, 2010 Chris Wilper and Stuart Lewis offered a one-hour overview of new features in Fedora 3.3 and DSpace 1.6. The session concluded with a lively question and answer period with some of the 55 participants from around the globe.

DuraSpace has released DSpace 1.6.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Community-requested features in the new release include an enhanced statistics package which provides more information about how your repository is being used, an embargo facility so items can be kept dark for a period of time, and a batch metadata editing tool which can be used to change, add, find/replace metadata as well as facilitate mass moves, re-order values or add new items in bulk. And there’s more such as authority control which contains an integration with the Sherpa Romeo Service for publisher names, as well as the Library of Congress Nameservice. Other new features include:

• Delegated administration
• OpenSearch
• Command launcher
• OAI-PMH harvesting of items from remote repositories
• Configurable OAI-PMH dublin core output
• Move item functionality in XMLUI
• If-Modified-Since / Last-Modified header support in XMLUI
• Change to logging behaviour to ensure better log retention and management
• Update to the latest handle server library
• Ability to perform batch imports and exports from zip files of items
• New test scripts to test database and email settings
• Ability to set legal jurisdiction in creative commons licensing

DuraSpace has released a webinar on "DuraCloud: Enabling Services for Managing Data in the Cloud" with Michele Kimpton and Bill Branan.

• Audio
• Presentation

Tim Donohue, Research Programmer at IDEALS, has made his "Making DSpace 1.5 Your Own: Customizations via Overlays" presentation available on SlideShare.