Michele Kimpton
Executive Director
DSpace Foundation
Sandy Payette
Executive Director, Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons Inc.
The DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons are investigating the feasibility and interest of a new service named DuraSpace to serve academic libraries, universities, and other organizations in providing perpetual access to digital content. DuraSpace can be understood as a Web-based service that makes stored digital content more durable, manageable, accessible, and easier to share. A key design feature of DuraSpace is to leave the basics of pure storage those who do it best (storage providers) and to overlay storage solutions with additional functionality that is essential to ensuring long-term access and ease of use. The service provides baseline functionality that begins with the ability to replicate and distribute content across multiple cloud providers. It adds value over and above storage by enabling the deployment of services to support access, preservation, re-use, and sharing of content stored in the cloud.
Both organizations are currently in the planning and prototyping phase of the project, made possible through a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with the intention of launching a pilot in summer 2009. This presentation will include the latest details on DuraSpace software development, cloud partners, and pilot projects. Other aspects of the DSpace/Fedora collaboration will also be discussed.
Handout (MS Word)