NEWS RELEASE: DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Form Working Collaboration

July 29, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Sandy Payette, Executive Director Fedora Commons, 607 
255-2773, spayette@fedora-commons.org
Michele Kimpton, Executive Director DSpace
Foundation, 617 253-7746, michele@dspace.org

DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Form Working Collaboration



Sandy Payette and Michele Kimpton on the steps of the Library of 
Congress in Washington, D.C. where a Joint Information Systems 
Committee's (JISC) Common Repository Interface Group (CRIG) 
"RepoCamp" was held on July 25, 2008. Photograph by David Flanders.

Washington, D.C.-July 29, 2008   Today two of the largest providers 
of open source software for managing and providing access to digital 
content, the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons, announced plans to 
combine strengths to work on joint initiatives that will more closely 
align their organizations' goals and better serve both open source 
repository communities in the coming months.

This advance comes as institutions such as universities, libraries, 
museums and research laboratories worldwide are focused on utilizing 
open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation 
of scholarly, scientific, and cultural heritage digital content into 
the future. Making books, articles, films, music, large and small 
data sets, scholarly works, multi-media, learning objects and 
mash-ups from all parts of the globe discoverable and accessible is 
at the core of the DSpace and Fedora collaboration.

The collaboration is expected to benefit over 500 organizations from 
around the world who are currently using either DSpace (examples 
include MIT, Rice University, Texas Digital Library and University of 
Toronto) or Fedora (examples include the National Library of France, 
New York Public Library, Encyclopedia of Chicago and eSciDoc) open 
source software to create repositories for a wide variety of purposes.

Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) director Clifford Lynch 
remarked, "Repositories are a key part of the infrastructure for 
supporting scholarly work, and they need to integrate more 
effectively with a range of other evolving components. I think there 
are great opportunities for DSpace and Fedora to work together not 
only on repository interoperability but on common approaches to 
repository roles in the scholarly and scientific workflows."

The decision to collaborate came out of meetings held this spring 
where members of DSpace and Fedora Commons communities discussed 
multiple dimensions of cooperation and collaboration between the two 
organizations.  Ideas included leveraging the power and reach of open 
source knowledge communities by using the same services and standards 
in the future.  The organizations will also explore opportunities to 
provide new capabilities for accessing and preserving digital 
content, developing common web services, and enabling 
interoperability across repositories.

In the spirit of advancing open source software, Fedora Commons and 
DSpace will look at ways to leverage and incubate ideas, community 
and culture to:

1. Provide the best technology and services to open source repository 
framework   communities.

2. Evaluate and synchronize, where possible, both organizations' 
technology roadmaps to enable convergence and interoperability of key 
architectural components.

3. Demonstrate how the DSpace and Fedora open source repository 
frameworks offer a unique value proposition compared to proprietary 
solutions.

The announcement came on the heels of an event sponsored by the Joint 
Information Systems Committee's (JISC) Common Repository Interface 
Group (CRIG) held at the Library of Congress.  The event, known as 
"RepoCamp," was a forum where developers gathered to discuss 
innovative approaches to improving interoperability and 
web-orientation for digital repositories.  Sandy Payette, Executive 
Director of Fedora Commons, and Michele Kimpton, Executive Director 
of the DSpace Foundation, reiterated their commitment to 
collaboration and encouraged input and participation   from both 
communities as work gets underway.

About the DSpace Foundation
The DSpace Foundation (http://dspace.org/) was formed in 2007 to 
support to the growing global community of institutions using DSpace 
open source software to manage scholarly works in a digital archive. 
DSpace was jointly developed in 2002 by HP and the MIT Libraries. 
Today, there are over more than 350 organizations worldwide a using 
the software to capture, preserve and share their artifacts, 
documents, collections and research data. To learn more about the 
DSpace community of users see: 
http://www.dspace.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=596&Itemid=182

About Fedora Commons
In 2007 Fedora Commons (http://fedora-commons.org/) was established 
as the permanent home of Fedora open source software which is a 
robust, integrated, repository platform that enables storage, access 
and management of virtually any kind of digital content. Fedora has 
been downloaded 25,000 times in the last year, and is used by over 
125 national libraries, institutions, and businesses worldwide to do 
more with their digital collections, enable long-term preservation of 
digital assets, build on a flexible and extensible, modular 
architecture, keep control of their data, and participate in Fedora's 
innovative community. To find out about Fedora organizations, 
institutions and projects see: 
http://fedora.info/wiki/index.php/Fedora_Commons_Community_Registry.