HP and the MIT Libraries today announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide support to the growing community of institutions that use DSpace, an open source software solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive….
The foundation will assume responsibility for providing leadership and support to the ever-growing DSpace community and promote even wider distribution and use. Michele Kimpton, formerly of the Internet Archive, will serve as executive director of the DSpace Foundation….
More than 200 projects around the world are using DSpace and additional projects are getting underway, including:
2008 Virtual Olympic Museum/Beihang University: Beihang University in Beijing, one of China’s top universities, will use DSpace to archive the 2008 China Summer Olympics, thus creating a collection of materials about the Beijing games that can be shared over the Internet quickly and easily. It is scheduled to open in March 2008.
Texas Digital Library: This project provides a digital infrastructure for the scholarly activities of Texas universities, which possess an enormous amount of intellectual capital that is not readily available to faculty, staff and students. The library’s contents include open access journals, electronic theses and dissertations, faculty datasets, departmental databases, digital archives, course management and learning materials, digital media and special collections….
The China Digital Museum: This project includes 18 campus museums, each with 20,000 - 50,000 objects covering geoscience, biology, anthropology, science and technology….
Open Repository: A managed service from BioMed Central in the United Kingdom, Open Repository will build, launch, host and maintain institutional repositories for organizations….
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE): A non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting liberal education, NITLE offers its participating colleges a pilot for a hosted and shared instance of the DSpace open source software. For a fee, NITLE hosts the pilot….
“The creation of the DSpace Foundation and Michele Kimpton’s appointment are important steps in the evolution of DSpace,” said Ann J. Wolpert, director, MIT Libraries. “Together these actions signal that both the platform and the community have successfully reached the point where an independent organization is needed to direct the project.” …
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/17/2007 10:15:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
