Help wanted: Wikipedian.  VIVO has a Wikipedia page.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIVO_(software).  Looks like it was written in 2017.  If you were involved, or would like to help expand/maintain the page, that would be great!  Please contact Mike Conlon.  Thanks!

The VIVO Project, 2019.  We live in interesting times.  Lots of change, lots of challenges.  Thankfully, the VIVO community works to a common purpose, with support and effort directed toward improving the ability of everyone to represent information about scholarship and use that information to showcase the work of scholars, use the information to improve our institutions and our ability to advance, curate and share knowledge, and to help people find the expertise they need.  Here are just a few of the things we can look forward to in 2019:

• First ever architectural fly-in in Orlando in January
• Additional participation in VIVO’s open source development sprints
• New development in accord with the Product Direction for 2019
• Advances in ontology, internationalization, and visualization
• First ever international conference – VIVO 2019 in Podgorica, Montenegro, September 4-6.

There are many opportunities for you to help the effort.  Drop by an interest group call (see below).  All are welcome!

The world of scholarship, 2019. Much is changing in the world of scholarship, particularly as it relates to VIVO as a collector and representation of the efforts of scholars at institutions.  Two big ideas seem to be gaining ground.

Open, disambiguated, scholarly metadata at scale.  Tools for combining metadata for VIVO and other systems was discussed at CNI with many participants. I feel the ecosystem is reaching a tipping point where gathering the world’s open scholarly metadata is within the reach of several open groups.  These groups are further poised to apply machine learning for disambiguation as some commercial providers have already done. Research Graph, ERNIE, SHARE, Impact Story, CrossRef, Internet Archives, Wikidata and WikiCite, CD2H and others are all within reach of creating and providing disambiguated, open scholarly metadata at scale. 2019 should be an interesting year.

The distributed web.  It seems odd to talk about the distributed web – the web is very distributed with millions of web sites and billions of pages.  Well, yes, but.  Several large information sources dominate the web – Google, Facebook, and other super-centralized information sources create controlled environments.  But we see universities, libraries, and government agencies creating local collections of digital objects and metadata.  Perhaps these can remain with their curators and be used as needed across the web.  The Solid Project at MIT, Triple Pattern Fragments (in VIVO and many other systems), and other efforts look to use data and metadata in a distributed manner, not requiring the aggregation common in centralized current approaches.  Expect to hear more about this at the VIVO conference and elsewhere in the coming year.

What are additional “big ideas” we should be considering as we develop strategy and plans for VIVO?  Join the conversation on our email lists, Slack, and help shape the project by becoming a developer, a member, a documentation specialist, a task force lead, or involved with project governance.  It looks to be a very interesting year.

Calls this week  All times US Eastern.  Task forces and interest groups are always interested in new participants.  All meetings via Zoom with dial-in numbers available.

• Development Interest Group will meet Tuesday at 11 AM
• VIVO Conference Planning Task Force will meet Wednesday at 10 AM
• VIVO Committers will meet Wednesday at 10 AM
• Product Evolution Task Force will meet Wednesday, 11 AM
• The Ontology Interest Group will meet Thursday at 11 AM
• Project Resources will meet Thursday at 10 AM
• Structure and Governance will meet Thursday at 10 AM
• 2018 Membership Task Force will meet Thursday at 3 PM

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director

The post VIVO Updates for January 21, 2019 — Wikipedia, VIVO in 2019, data in 2019, calls this week appeared first on Duraspace.org.

From Pascal-Nicolas Becker, The Library Code GmbH

(German version below)

The DSpace Anwendertreffen 2019 will take place at the University of Bamberg, on Thursday, 11th April 2019 and Friday, 12th April 2019. It is organized by the University Library of Bamberg and The Library Code GmbH. This meeting is about informal exchange between DSpace users, and therefore also of DSpace-CRIS users of course. We kindly ask for submissions in the format of presentations, round tables, and for the first time workshops. While presentations are mostly given by one or two speakers, the idea of the round tables is to give DSpace users the space to discuss a specific topic. Both formats will take place on the first day (Thursday) of the Anwendertreffen just as the meeting of the DSpace Konsortium Deutschland.

This year we introduce a new format that will take place on the second day (Friday): workshops. Workshops will give DSpace users the opportunity to work together on a specific topic, e.g. how to connect to/use an external service or the demonstration/discussion of an add-on, for up to three hours. The DSpace-CRIS workshop, which we introduced in the last year and are planning to repeat, is a good example of the new format.

We kindly ask you to send us proposals for all three formats. If you would like to give a presentation, please send us a short abstract including an estimation of the time your talk will take. If there is a topic you think a round table should discuss, please send us your idea. If you’re willing to offer a round table on a dedicated topic, please send us a short description. And if you want to organize a workshop, please send us a title, an abstract, a timeframe, how many users roughly you expect and if you have any specific request like tables for participants, internet connection, or anything else you’ll need for your workshop. While the main conference language will be German, we will accept presentations, roundtables and workshops in English as well. Please send your proposals by email to anwendertreffen@the-library-code.de by the deadline of February 15h, 2019.

(Deutschsprachige Version)

Das DSpace Anwendertreffen 2019 findet am Donnerstag, den 11. April 2019 und Freitag, den 12. April an der Universität Bamberg statt. Es wird von der Universitätsbibliothek Bamberg und The Library Code GmbH organisiert. Ziel ist der Austausch zwischen Nutzerinnen und Nutzern von DSpace und somit natürlich auch Nutzerinnen und Nutzern von DSpace-CRIS. Wir bitten dieses Jahr um Beiträge in Form von Vorträgen, Thementischen und erstmals Workshops. Während Vorträge hauptsächlich von einer Sprecherin, einem Sprecher oder mehreren Sprecher/innen vorgetragen werden, sollten Thementischen Anwenderinnen und Anwendern von DSpace den Raum für Diskussionen zu einem bestimmten Thema geben. Beide Formate werden, ebenso wie das Teilnehmertreffen des DSpace Konsortiums Deutschland, am ersten Tag (Donnerstag) stattfinden. Daneben führen wir in diesem Jahr ein weiteres Format ein, das am zweiten Tag (Freitag) Raum finden wird: Workshops. Workshops geben DSpace Anwenderinnen und Anwendern die Möglichkeit bis zu drei Stunden ein spezielles Thema, bspw. die Verknüpfung von DSpace mit einem speziellen Service oder die ausführliche Präsentation eines Add-ons, gemeinsam zu behandeln. Ein gutes Beispiel für dieses neue Format ist der Workshop zu DSpace-CRIS, der im vergangenen Jahr erstmals stattgefunden hat und auch in diesem Jahr wieder fest eingeplant wird.

Wir bitten Sie freundlich, uns Vorschläge für alle drei Formate zu schicken: Wenn Sie einen Vortrag halten möchten, senden Sie uns bitte eine kurze Zusammenfassung inklusive einer Angabe zum zeitlichen Rahmen Ihres Vortrags. Bitte senden Sie uns auch Themen, die Ihrer Meinung nach im Rahmen eines Thementisches behandelt werden sollen. Wenn Sie bereit sind, einen Tisch zu einem speziellen Thema anzubieten, senden Sie uns bitte eine kurze Beschreibung. Und falls Sie einen Workshop organisieren möchten, senden Sie uns bitte den Titel, eine Zusammenfassung, den voraussichtlichen zeitlichen Rahmen, eine grobe Anzahl der von Ihnen erwarteten Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer sowie Angaben zu den örtlichen Voraussetzungen für den Workshop zu. Auch wenn die Konferenzsprache Deutsch ist, akzeptieren wir gerne auch Vorträge, Thementische und Workshops in englischer Sprache. Bitte senden Sie uns Ihre Vorschläge per E-Mail anwendertreffen@the-library-code.de bis zum 15. Februar 2019.

The post DSpace Anwendertreffen 2019–Call for Participation appeared first on Duraspace.org.

The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO)’sDigital Preservation Interest Group featured “DAM if you do and DAM if you don’t!,” a review of the CUNY Graduate Center’s implementation of ArchivesDirect, which pairs hosted Archivematica with DuraCloud. The session was presented by Stephen Klein, Digital Services Librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY); Ashley Blewer, AV Preservation Specialist at Artefactual; and Kelly Stewart, Digital Preservation Services Manager at Artefactual. Regina Carra published a recap of the presentation on SAA’s Electronic Records Section blog.

About DuraCloud
DuraCloud is an open source, hosted service that makes it easy to control where and how your organization preserves content in the cloud. DuraCloud enables your institution to store content with expert cloud storage providers while adding lightweight features that enable digital preservation, data access, and data sharing. The service is also available from 4Science via DuraCloud Europe.

The post DuraCloud and ArchivesDirect Featured in METRO’s Digital Preservation Interest Group Presentation appeared first on Duraspace.org.

The new DuraCloud 5.1.0 release resolves several issues and brings transfer improvements in the DuraCloud Sync and Retrieval tools. Support was also added for independent management of existing secondary storage providers, such as Amazon Glacier and Chronopolis dark archive network.

DuraCloud is a freely available open source platform, and also a hosted service that makes it easy to control where and how your organization preserves content in the cloud. DuraCloud enables your institution to store content with expert cloud storage providers while adding lightweight features that enable digital preservation, data access, and data sharing. The service is also available from 4Science via DuraCloud Europe.

A big thank you to the Texas Digital Library for their assistance in selecting tasks and working through issues in this release. Detailed release and deployment notes can be found on the DuraCloud GitHub repository.

To learn more about contributing to DuraCloud or to subscribe to the DuraCloud hosted service, please contact info@duracloud.org.

The post Now Available: DuraCloud 5.1 Release appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Heather Greer Klein, Services Coordinator for DuraSpace, presented to the NDSA Infrastructure Interest Group December 2018 meeting about determining the full cost of Amazon Web Services when planning for cloud storage. These costs include highly variable charges such as the monthly data transfer and export. While these charges are bundled into an annual invoice as part of the DuraCloud service, they must be accounted for when planning for contracting directly with Amazon Web Services.

You can view the presentation slides and notes or watch a video of the web-based presentation on the Infrastructure Interest Group YouTube channel. The video also includes a presentation by Kara Van Malssen, Partner and Senior Consultant at AVP, about AVP’s cloud storage vendor profiles.

About DuraCloud
DuraCloud is an open source, hosted service that makes it easy to control where and how your organization preserves content in the cloud. DuraCloud enables your institution to store content with expert cloud storage providers while adding lightweight features that enable digital preservation, data access, and data sharing. The service is also available from 4Science via DuraCloud Europe.

The post VIDEO and SLIDES from the NDSA Infrastructure Interest Group Presentation: Uncovering the True Cost of Cloud Storage appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break!  It’s a time for family, good cheer, for reflecting on the year past, and the year to come.

2018 was an important year for VIVO.  Many wonderful things happened as project participation grew and the idea of an open source system for representing scholarship grew around the world.  The project is very strong and provides a vibrant, open approach to providing critical information needed to improve the practice of research and scholarship.  We are producing an annual report (our first!) Expect to hear more in the weeks ahead.

Over the break we tweaked the wiki a bit.  Hopefully things are a bit cleaner and a bit clearer.  Colors were simplified, pages simplified, the calendar improved, some navigation improved, some obsolete material archived, and some pages improved.  We try to have a light touch in such changes so that people can find things, we also need to make sure that current material is easiest to find.  The SPARQL Resources were significantly improved – all examples now run correctly in current versions of VIVO and additional examples and references have been added.  If ever you find obsolete material in the VIVO wiki, please feel free to update it.  You’ll need a Duraspace account which you can request from sysadmin@durasapce.org 

We’ll share some thoughts about the project and 2019 here next year.  Our Product Direction for 2019 provides an overview of where the software is headed in the coming year.

Books for VIVO  Each month we suggest a book for your VIVO library.  This month’s book is by Barend Mons, of the Leiden University Medical Center, GoFAIR, and CoData.  Professor Mons has written a book for all data practitioners interested in the FAIR data principles.  The book uses hundreds of questions to challenge practitioners in thinking through how to make their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.  All those engaged in the production, curation, and sharing of data from scientific work will appreciate the insights here.  As one involved in these process for my entire career, I can say that this book would have been a tremendous help along the way and asks many of the questions we asked each other as we tried to create and share data.  The lessons here are not limited to scientific data.  VIVO is involved in the collection and sharing of data (some call metadata) regarding the work of scholarship.  VIVO practitioners, and groups tasked with creating and advancing VIVO implementations would undoubtedly benefit from discussing the issues raised here.

Mons, Barend 2018. Data Stewardship for Open Science: Implementing FAIR Principles 1st Edition ISBN 978-1498753173. 244 pages.

Open Repositories  will be held in Hamburg Germany, June 10-13, 2019.  The call for proposals is open here https://or2019.blogs.uni-hamburg.de/cfp/  While primarily focused on data and publication repositories, VIVO as a metadata repository, and as a front-end to repositories such as Dspace, Invenio, and Fedora is of interest.  If you are presenting or attending please let us know.  It could be an opportunity for a VIVO meet-up!

Wikidata  Before the holiday break, the developers group hosted a guest presentation by Daniel Mietchen of the University of Virginia and a wikimedian.  You can find his talk here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Scholia/Talks/Wikidata_and_VIVO_in_2018  There is also a video recording.  There is interest in how VIVO and Wikidata might collaborate – how we might provide data to Wikidata and consume data from Wikidata.  Have ideas about this?  Please share on VIVO Slack (http://bit.ly/vivo-slack) or email.

Calls this week  VIVO calls resume this week.  All are welcome!  All times are US eastern time.  Follow the links for call information.

• Development Interest Group meets Tuesday 11 AM
• VIVO Committers meet Wednesday at 10 AM
• Architectural Fly-in Planning meets Wednesday at noon
• VIVO Conference Planning Task Force meets Wednesday at 10 AM
• Product Evolution Task Force meets Wednesday at 11 AM
• Ontology Interest Group meets Thursday 10 AM
• Project Resources meet Thursday at 10 AM
• Structure and Governance meets Thursday at 11 AM
• Membership Task Force meets Thursday at 3 PM

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon 
VIVO Project Director

The post VIVO Updates for January 6, 2019 — Happy New Year, Books for VIVO, Open Repositories, Wikidata, Calls This Week appeared first on Duraspace.org.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Kalanidhi Division in collaboration with DSquare Technologies (Certified DuraSpace Contributor for DSpace) hosted a “DSpace Users Group Meeting and Training Workshop” on 3-4 December, 2018.

Key objectives of the event included bringing the local user community together and enhancing their understanding of DSpace based on experiences of users and practitioners.

DSpace  is an  open source  repository application typically used to create solutions for easy and secured digital access and long-term preservation of texts and images. One of the main use cases for
the solution is open access  repositories for scholarly digital content. DSpace Open Source software is developed by a growing community of developers committed to continuously expanding and improving the software. It’s also a recommended solution for Digital Archives as per the Government of India’s Open source solution framework.

Shri Shravan Kumar, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Culture, inaugurated the programme. While speaking on the occasion, he emphasized that Kalanidhi is the leading repository of research and reference Resources in Humanities and Arts and such academic activities must be continued to benefit the masses. Dr. Ramesh C Gaur, HoD (Kalanidhi) gave the welcome speech. Almost 100 users, professionals and students from all over India attended the User group meeting to gain understanding of the concepts and best practices for using DSpace as a Digital Library system.

The User Group meeting was followed by a day-long training session on DSpace conducted by the expert team of DSquare Technologies.

The post DSpace Users Group Meeting and Training Workshop Held in New Delhi, India appeared first on Duraspace.org.

From Daniel Bernstein, Technical Lead and Developer, on behalf of the Fedora Committers

We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 5.0.0 December 14th, 2018.

The move from Fedora 3.x to 4.x represented a full reimplementation of the Fedora architecture.

The move from Fedora 4.x to 5.x DOES NOT represent the same scope of change. The changes between Fedora 4.7.5 and 5.0.0 are relatively small, although they represent non-backwards compatible breaking changes due to API and data model differences.

As of the 5.0.0 release, the Fedora project is conforming to standard Semantic Versioning. See the Fedora Semantic Versioning policy for details.

• Resources
• Team
• Summary

Resources

• This release requires Java 8
• Downloads
• Javadocs

Team Release Manager

• Danny Bernstein

Major  development contributions

• Ben Pennell
• Peter Eichman
• Longshou Situ
• Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed
• Jared Whiklo
• Bethany Seeger
• Danny Bernstein
• Andrew Woods

All Developers

• Aaron Birkland
• Andrew Woods
• Ben Pennell
• Bethany Seeger
• Danny Bernstein
• Esmé Cowles
• Jared Whiklo
• Joe Harrington
• Jon Roby
• Longshou Situ
• Michael Durbin
• Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed
• Peter Eichman
• Randall Floyd
• Yinlin Chen

Testers and Documentation Contributors

• Danny Bernstein
• Esmé Cowles
• Jared Whiklo
• Randall Floyd
• James Silas Creel
• Andrew Woods
• Yinlin Chen
• Julie Hardesty
• Anna Goslen
• Jennifer Young
• Ruth K Tillman
• Kevin Ford

Issue Reporters

• Aaron Birkland
• Adam Wead
• Andrew Woods
• Ben Pennell
• Bethany Seeger
• Bill Branan
• Daniel Lamb
• Danny Bernstein
• David Wilcox
• Esmé Cowles
• Jared Whiklo
• Joe Harrington
• Jon Roby
• Kevin Ford
• Longshou Situ
• Michael Durbin
• Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed
• Peter Eichman
• Ralf Claussnitzer
• Randall Floyd
• Rob Sanderson
• Scott Prater
• Yinlin Chen

Summary

The focus of this major release is alignment of the Fedora codebase with the Fedora API Specification.  While the code behind basic CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete) changed only incrementally from the previous release (4.7.5),  Versioning and Access Control functionality underwent major refactorings. Per the Fedora API Specification, this release of the Fedora application implements the following underlying specifications:

• Linked Data Platform 1.0 – CRUD
• Web Access Control (as used by the Solid project) – Authorization
• Memento protocol (rfc7089) – Versioning
• Instance Digests in HTTP (rfc3230) – Binary Fixity

294 JIRA issues were worked by fifteen developers for this release.  In addition, we also developed the Fedora API Test Suite which can be run against this release to verify compliance with the aforementioned specification.  Finally, the documentation underwent a full overhaul with special attention to the modifications to the API changes, additions, deletions, deprecations, configuration settings, and a new User’s Guide focused on content modeling and metadata recommendations.

Due to the changes to existing APIs and data models, Fedora 5.0.0 is not backwards compatible.  The Fedora Import Export Utility does not currently support upgrading data from Fedora 4 to Fedora 5. However adding upgrade support this utility is a top priority for the first quarter of 2019. Please see the outstanding issues section at the bottom of the release page for any known issues.

Deprecations

The following features are still in this release, but have been flagged for future removal.

• Backup / Restore endpoints
• Copy / Move features

Housekeeping and Bugs

 Click here to expand…

Complete Listing of Resolved Tickets

 Click here to expand…

Outstanding issues slated for the 5.0.1 Bugfix release (To be released in January 2019)

• FCREPO-2969 – Cannot add rdf:type properties to binaries CLOSED
• FCREPO-2970 – Cannot version RDF resource with a blank node CLOSED

The post NOW AVAILABLE: Fedora 5.0.0 appeared first on Duraspace.org.

From Atmire

Atmire reflections on the requirements for Plan S compliant Open Access repositories.

Coalition S recently released guidance on the implementation of Plan S, an initiative by European funders to make full and immediate Open Access a reality by 2020. Very specifically, this guidance contains section 10.2 – Requirements for Plan S compliant Open Access repositories.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has issued an initial response to the guidance. In this article, Atmire analyses each of the requirements, the COAR feedback and provides a perspective on what the implications might be for DSpace repositories.  Read the full article at https://www.atmire.com/articles/detail/impact-of-plan-s-implementation-guidelines-on-dspace-repositories.

The post Impact of Plan S Implementation Guidelines on DSpace Repositories appeared first on Duraspace.org.

As 2018 draws to a close all of us here at DuraSpace wish our friends and colleagues near and far the happiest of holiday seasons, and extend warm wishes for a prosperous and healthy new year. We are grateful for your continued interest in and support of our shared goal of preserving and providing access to the world’s intellectual, cultural and scientific heritage.

The post Happy Holidays From DuraSpace appeared first on Duraspace.org.

From Atmire

DSpace Repositories serving scholarly content generally receive a significant amount of daily download traffic from Google Scholar. In a recent webinar for Atmire clients, Bram Luyten zoomed in on:

• The basic principles of how Google Scholar indexes your repository
• Detecting and resolving indexing problems using the free Atmire Analyzer
• Monitoring traffic originating from Google Scholar with Google Analytics

Click here to download the slides, speaker notes and recording of this webinar from Atmire’s Open Repository Demo installation.

Future webinars

We are already preparing our next webinar. If you have feedback of suggestions for future Atmire webinars, don’t hesitate to send them using this feedback form.

The post Exposing Repository Content to Google Scholar appeared first on Duraspace.org.

From DSquare Technologies

DSquare Technologies is pleased to announce GDPR solution for DSpace.

Most of us are aware that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was enacted during May, 2018 resulting in stricter data privacy requirements. It is now more  important than ever to ensure security of Personal Identifiable information.

DSquare Technologies developed a GDPR compliance solution for DSpace with GDPR requirements in mind and at the request of some of the esteemed institutions served by DSquare Technologies (Certified DuraSpace  Contributor for DSpace). While solutions are evolving for further improvement some of this solution’s highlights cover:  i) protecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII), ii) right to be forgotten, iii) communication about any data breach, iv) managing cookies as per user session, v) OWASP listed vulnerabilities complied repository and many other parameters for ensuring compliance with GDPR.

DSquare Technologies is happy to help institutions in ensuring compliance with GDPR and making its repositories more secured and reliable for users. For more information contact: sales@d2t.co | Skype: dsquare_technologies | Cell/WhatsApp: +919717396363

About DSquare Technologies

DSquare Technologies is a Certified DuraSpace Contributor and Registered Service Provider for DSpace addressing information management requirements starting from Entry level to Enterprise scale repositories having multiple millions of pages. Some of add-ons developed on DSpace are Real time data analytics & Reports, Browser based content viewer, Modern user interface with mobile first approach with RTL, GDPR etc. that enable it to provide solutions for verticals like Libraries, Archives, Research, Judiciary, Knowledge management, Office documents management etc.  

The post Making DSpace GDPR Compliant appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Our interest groups and task forces  VIVO has interest groups – sort of permanent recurring groups that meet to discuss topics of shared interest, and task forces – time limited groups that meet to create a work product.  Anyone can create either.

We currently have two interest groups – Development, which meets weekly, and Ontology, which meets every other week.  To join an interest group, just show up.  The groups are very friendly, there is no other requirement.  Showing up is easy, just dial-in or use Zoom (free software you can download to your computer) using the instructions on the meeting page (click on the links for each group to see the meeting pages).

We have a bunch of task forces:

• Product Evolution  Experiments in a new front end.
• Conference Planning We’re all going to Montenegro! Want to help?  No experience required.
• VIVO Camp planning Want to be an instructor?
• Theming and UI Improving the VIVO UX
• Telling VIVO Stories An occasional group that helps tell the stories of VIVO implementations
• Membership Want to help VIVO grow its membership?  This is the place.
• Internationalization Working to improve the use of languages in VIVO
• Research Intelligence  This group is forming an interest group in 2019.

All have Slack channels and wiki sites (linked above).  To join VIVO slack, see http://bit.ly/vivo-slack To join in the work of a task force, just show up.  And see above, the groups are very friendly and joining a meeting is as easy as dialing in or clicking on a Zoom link.

Coalition of Networked Information (CNI)  This week I attended the CNI fall meeting in Washington DC.  CNI is always interesting, a simple conference format – half day to start, 3/4 day to wrap-up.  An opening and closing plenary keynote.  Parallel sessions providing “project updates” – work of interest to those working on information approaches in scholarship, with an emphasis on libraries and librarianship.  Long breaks to provide plenty of time for catching up.  Held twice a year, CNI is one of my favorite conferences – a good chance to catch up with colleagues and to see interesting work.

The fall meeting was a chance to catch up with Duraspace board members Tyler Walters, Dan Cohen, Evviva Weinraub, Rob Cartolano, and Tom Cramer, David Wilcox who helps with membership, and Erin Tripp CEO of Duraspace, many of our supporters and friends including David Carlson and Michael Bolton of TAMU, Mike Winkler, Dean Krafft, Kristi Holmes of Northwestern, Rick Johnson of SHARE, Ken Klingenstein of Internet 2, Laura Wruble of GWU, Valrie Minson of UF, and many others.

Some of the more interesting things I saw:

• SHARE is working on some cool technology for harvesting metadata using Node-RED.
• Ken Klingenstein caught us up on current work in identity systems and attribute management
• Jason Priem gave an update on ImpactStory – they have an open API and have harvested much open metadata regarding scholarly communication.  Likewise, Internet Archive has an active scholarly communications harvesting business with an open API.  These sources join a growing collection of open metadata at scale including Research Graph, SHARE, and others.  With these emerging resources, and work on disambiguation at these sources, there is much to look forward to.
• Patricia Brennan gave the closing keynote on work at the US National Library of Medicine.  Having come from this world, it was very exciting to see the discoveries in preventive medicine, public health, and treatment resulting from advanced informatics.

2018 was a fantastic year  VIVO had a fantastic year in 2018.  So many good things happened.  All because of our wonderful and growing community.  As we head into a time to reflect on the year that was and consider the year to come, I want to extend a special thanks to all the great people who work on the VIVO Project.

See you in 2019  This is the last VIVO Updates for 2018.  We’ve got some meetings this week, and then a break for the holidays.  We’ll see you all in 2019 with a first VIVO Updates coming January 6.

I hope you have a wonderful holiday break!

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director

The post VIVO Updates for December 16, 2018 — Interest groups and task forces, Coalition of Networked Information, a fantastic 2018 appeared first on Duraspace.org.

The ARKs-in-the-Open (AITO) team made great strides in 2018 toward their goal to transition the ARK specification and registry from the California Digital Library to a community supported and managed activity.

Some highlights of the work so far this year:
• The project received expressions of interest from 27 organizations on 4 continents.
• The project team developed a project vision, resources and value statement, and roadmap.
• The AITO Advisory Group formed and meets monthly to move the project forward according to the roadmap.
• Work has begun to form working groups to focus on project sustainability, outreach, and technical development. This builds on results from the The ARK Identifier Summit and Experts Day at the National Library of France, March 21-22, 2018.
• Summit programme and videos recordings (in French)
• Experts Day minutes (in English)
• Project presentations at several international meetings: iPres, the Decentralized Web Summit, and Singapore PID Workshop.

For 2019, the team’s priorities include:
• Finalizing initial charters for each working group
• Appointing members to all three working groups
• Developing a financial and governance model

If you’d like to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in this project, please sign up for the ARK mailing list or visit ARKsInTheOpen.org.

The post ARKs in the Open: Project Update #8, 2018 Wrap-Up and Looking to 2019 appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Whoa, what a sprint  Last week we had a sprint for newcomers to the VIVO project.  We set a new record for participation in a sprint (21).  I want to thank all the newcomers from all over the world.  We had major efforts in internationalization, search technology, bug fixes, documentation, build process, user experience, and product evolution.  We had new teams with multiple participants join from George Washington University, Texas A&M, and Duke University.  And we had many “old hands” available to answer questions, and provide assistance.  The group worked on more than 50 tickets, closing 20.  And it was just a one week sprint!  We had a great closing session with many good ideas about how to improve development practices, provide assistance for new developers, and organize future sprints.  So many good ideas.  So much good work.  So good to meet and have a chance to work with so many talented good people!

RDA.  It was a busy RDA in Gaborone Botswana:

• VIVO was named in an RDA proposal for modeling attribution
• VIVO was recognized in work being done by the Provenance WG
• VIVO was discussed in the context of persistent identifiers for machines by the PIDINST WG
• I participated in the work of the Data Foundations and Terminology workgroup, and the FAIR sharing workgroup
• I was able to personally update many colleagues on the progress VIVO has made over the past year, including the organizers of the spring 2019 plenary in Philadelphia.  We have lots of VIVO folks in the Philadelphia area.  Perhaps we can plan a meet-up.

VIVO continues to gain mindshare on those working on metadata for research, particularly metadata for representing people and their scholarly works.

Congratulations to Barend Mons!  Dr. Professor Barend Mons of the University of Leiden, creator of the FAIR acronym, director of GoFAIR, past chair of the High Level Expert Group for the European Open Science Cloud and a former keynote at the second VIVO Conference (Washington DC, 2011) was elected president of Codata, the Committee on Data of the International Council for Science to serve a four year term.  It was a pleasure to catch up with Barend at RDA.  Congratulations Barend!

Ontology Interest Group  Interested in ontology?  We have a group for you!  Not sure what ontology is, or why it’s important?  Stop by and find out.  The Ontology Interest Group meets every other Thursday at 10 AM US Eastern time via Zoom.  The ontologists discuss the representation of scholarship as an ontology, study and incorporate the work of others, and create models and an ontology that can be used across systems and applications.  Developers stop by to consider how the ontology might be used in software.  The discussions are always open.  Everyone is welcome to attend.  Some of the issues that have been discussed recently include:

• Representation of identifiers, including ORCiD, DOI, and others
• What identifiers to include in VIVO
• How to manage ontological change
• Licenses for ontology
• Representation of translations, and multiple languages
• Representation of projects and the relationship of projects to grants
• Representation of works in the performing and visual arts
• What constitutes ontology and what constitutes annotation for the purpose of supporting applications
• Fundamental issues regarding the representation of scholarly works

From time to time, the ontologists will spin off a group to work on a particular problem.  And this may result in a proposed design for some extension or revision of the ontology.

If you are interested, please join the ontology channel on Slack, and the interest group meetings.

National Forum on Expert Finder Systems  A new conference is being organized for Feb 28 – March 1 in Orlando, Florida.  The National Forum on Expert Finder Systems is sponsored by Elsevier.  From their web site:

Expert finder systems (EFS) have been serving universities, businesses, and the research community for more than two decades. However, there are still no formal venues for EFS stakeholders to network, learn from each other, and help steer the future of this dynamic field

Many of the organizers have a background in the VIVO community.  Should be interesting.

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director

The post VIVO Updates for December 9, 2018 — sprint, RDA, Barend Mons, Ontology, expert finder systems appeared first on Duraspace.org.

On December 5th the DuraSpace Hot Topics Series, “The Revolution Will Be Open?” concluded with the fourth and final webinar in this series.  Andrew Smeall of Hindawi, Brian Hole of Ubiquity Press, and Anita Bandrowski of  SciCrunch presented, “How For-Profit Companies Can Be a Part of the Open Environment.”  In this one-hour webinar each presenter discussed their organizations’ roles in the world of open scholarly infrastructure and how their work can benefit the scholarly communication community while both keeping open the infrastructure that they provide and operating in a for-profit mode.

The webinar recording and presentation slides are available at https://duraspace.org/webinar/.

A special thanks to David Lewis and Michael Roy the curators of this series and to all of the webinar series presenters and participants.

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Message to DPN members from the DPN nodes

Yesterday the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) announced plans to cease operations. The individual nodes that collectively provided preservation services to DPN seek to reassure the DPN membership as well as the larger academic and digital preservation communities that we remain confident about the future of digital preservation.

We continue to support long-term distributed digital preservation. The rich array of collaborative, community-driven digital preservation services in higher education offers reliable benefits to the academic community, despite DPN’s departure. Several of the services represented by DPN nodes provided robust technical infrastructure to DPN depositors from strong organizational bases that serve other constituents as well. That strength is unshaken by this turn of events. In no way does DPN’s end obviate the need for continued redundant, resilient, diverse preservation services working together.

Consistent with the values we affirmed last year, in the document “Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values,” which we all signed, at the core of our digital preservation mission is the belief that “we can accomplish these goals better together rather than separately.” We are united in our dedication to continue exploring future collaborative opportunities. Our resolve and our resilience in pursuit of our common goals remains strong.

In the immediate future we will work together with DPN to assist its depositors during DPN’s shut down process. While we continue to identify next steps, we will be moving ahead from a collaborative position of strength. We are available to work with you to support current and future preservation needs in whatever way we can. You can expect further communication from the node where you deposited content very soon.

Signed (alphabetically),

Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust)
Chronopolis
DuraSpace
HathiTrust
Texas Digital Library (TDL)

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DuraSpace and the University of Toronto Libraries in collaboration with Scholars Portal and COPPUL (Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries) are pleased to announce a new joint project “DuraCloud Canada: Linking Data Repositories to Preservation Storage” funded by CANARIE, a vital component of Canada’s digital infrastructure supporting research, education and innovation.

The purpose of the proposed project is to connect preservation storage services through a common deposit layer based on open source software from DuraSpace called DuraCloud to research data preservation in Canada.

DuraCloud is a package of software components — some server based and others web and desktop based — that provides brokering services for cloud-based storage as well as a set of deposit tools and APIs that standardize the way users interact with cloud storage providers.

These software components are made available under open source licenses by DuraSpace and have been used to set up national services such as DuraCloud in the US and DuraCloud Europe. Using the same model and a similar deployment approach, the project will create a service called DuraCloud Canada with the goal of connecting preservation storage services to data repositories and bridging the current gap that exists between both.

The proposed project will make DuraCloud available for research data preservation in Canada by contributing to the DuraCloud open source codebase in order to facilitate the integration of existing data repositories. In doing so, it will fulfill multiple goals relating to the preservation of research data in Canada. It will provide an
interoperability layer between different preservation storage providers, expose a relatively easy-to-use API that data repositories may use to integrate with preservation storage options, and expose the set of pre-existing integrations that are already part of the DuraCloud system.

Work on this project will begin in November of 2018 and continue into 2020. Initial work will make use of DuraCloud within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment by adding storage integrations to existing Canadian data repositories. Once these connectors are in place, development will continue with the goal of allowing the DuraCloud software to be run within the University of Toronto data center rather than in AWS.

About CANARIE

CANARIE strengthens Canadian leadership in science and technology by delivering digital infrastructure that supports world-class research and innovation.

CANARIE and its twelve provincial and territorial partners form Canada’s National Research and Education Network. This ultra-high-speed network connects Canada’s researchers, educators and innovators to each other and to global data, technology, and colleagues.

Beyond the network, CANARIE funds and promotes reusable research software tools and national research data management initiatives to accelerate discovery, provides identity management services to the academic community, and offers advanced networking and cloud resources to boost commercialization in Canada’s technology sector.

Established in 1993, CANARIE is a non-profit corporation, with the majority of its funding provided by the Government of Canada.

For more information, please visit: www.canarie.ca

About DuraSpace

DuraSpace as an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization provides leadership and innovation for open technologies that promote durable, persistent access to digital data. We collaborate with academic, scientific, cultural, technology, and research communities by supporting projects and advancing services to help ensure that current and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage. Our vision is expressed in our organizational byline, “Working together to provide enduring access to the world’s digital heritage.” DuraSpace is the organizational home of the DuraCloud open source software.

About The University of Toronto Libraries

The University of Toronto Libraries system is the largest academic library in Canada and is ranked sixth among peer institutions in North America. The system consists of 42 libraries located on three university campuses: St. George, Mississauga, and Scarborough. This array of college libraries, special collections, and specialized libraries and information centres supports the teaching and research requirements of over 280 graduate programs, more than 60 professional programs, and about 700 undergraduate degree programs. In addition to more than 15 million volumes in 341 languages, the library system currently provides access to millions of electronic resources in various forms and over 31,000 linear metres of archival material. More than 150,000 new print volumes are acquired each year. The Libraries’ data centre houses more than 500 servers with a storage capacity of 1.5 petabytes.

Scholars Portal was formed in 2002 as a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) with the University of Toronto as service provider. The Scholars Portal technological infrastructure preserves and provides access to information resources collected and shared by Ontario’s 21 university libraries. Through the Scholars Portal online services, Ontario’s university students, faculty and researchers have access to an extensive and varied collection of e-journals, e-books, social science data sets, geo reference data and geospatial sets. Scholars Portal continues to respond to the research needs of Ontario universities through the creation of innovative information services and by working to ensure access to and preservation of this wealth of information.

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Sprint this week!  VIVO will be holding a one week sprint to introduce new developers to the project.  The print will focus on maintenance tasks.  If you’d like to learn about VIVO, how it is developed, and pitch in, this is a great opportunity.  You will want to be on VIVO Slack if you are not already.  Details regarding the sprint are available here:  2018-12 Sprint

January Architectural Fly-in The VIVO Project is planning an invited architectural fly-in to develop architectural approaches to addressing the statement of direction for 2019. The fly-in will bring together technical leaders to create documents that can be used to organized development sprints moving us in our desired direction. The fly-in will meet at the University of Florida Academic Research Center in Lake Nona Florida, and will be facilitated by Andrew Woods. You can read more about the fly-in here 2019 Architectural Fly-in The results of the fly-in will help orient technical work for 2019.

David Wilcox joins Membership Task Force David Wilcox of Duraspace is joining the VIVO Membership Task Force. David is well known in the Fedora community as the Fedora project manager. David has significant experience building and maintaining Fedora project membership. The Membership Task Force looks forward to working with David over the course of the coming year in its efforts to strengthen and grow VIVO membership.

Please welcome David to the VIVO community!

Books for VIVO Each month, we consider a book of value to the VIVO community. This month the book is “Basic Formal Ontology” by Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top level ontology that provides the framework for the VIVO ontology, and many other ontologies, particularly ontologies used in the natural sciences. BFO is rooted in the philosophical concept of realism. BFO tries to define things that exist in the natural world, and tries to avoid defining classes and properties of convenience. This approach leads naturally to creative tension with those who might take a more expedient approach — identifying elements that appear to have value and letting utility determine the value of the representation. Professor Barry Smith, the originator of BFO, has been called “the most famous philosopher in America.” His ideas can be controversial, but BFO forms the foundation for the Information Artifacts Ontology (also used by VIVO), the Gene Ontology, ontologies used in industry and government, and the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry ontologies. If you would like to know more about the foundational roots of the VIVO ontology, and of ontology in general, you can’t do better that Arp, Smith, and Spear. The VIVO ontology is mentioned in the book, as are many other ontologies based on BFO.

Robert Arp, Barry Smith, and Andrew D. Spear. 2015. Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. The MIT Press. ISBN-13 9780262527811.

Open Repositories Call for Proposals Open  Open Repositories will be held in Hamburg Germany, June 10-13, 2019. The call for proposal is currently open and closes January 9, 2019. You can find the call for proposals here: https://or2019.blogs.uni-hamburg.de/cfp/

Giving a presentation or poster about VIVO?  Know of an event of interest to the VIVO community?  We’d love to hear from you!  Please add the event to Conferences Attended and to Attend

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director

The post VIVO Updates for December 2, 2018 — Sprint this week, January architecture fly-in, David Wilcox, Books for VIVO, Open Repository CFP appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Open access to scientific findings is essential. This conviction is shared by both the Executive Board of TU Berlin and the University Library. To this end, the Technische Universität Berlin approved an open access policy at the start of this year, thus lending its explicit support to its academics and researchers wishing to publish their papers as open access documents. Open access ensures that publications are freely accessible, while maintaining the highest academic standards. TU Berlin is also one of approximately 200 academic institutions in Germany actively engaged in the DEAL project, which seeks to prevent the big academic publishing houses from establishing a monopoly. In a further step, the TU Berlin University Library is now initiating the founding of a consortium for the development of the “DSpace” open source software. The consortium consists of 25 academic institutions.

“We wish to ensure the development of the ‘DSpace’ software through the consortium, while also helping to shape the strategic focus of this software,” says Jürgen Christof, executive director of the TU Berlin University Library. “DSpace” is the most used software for operating open access repositories. Such repositories serve to make publications, research data and documents available to everybody, free of charge and on a permanent basis. As such, “DSpace” is not only the software behind TU Berlin’s “DepositOnce“ repository, it also forms one of the technical bases for open access publishing in general.

“DSpace“ open source software

“DSpace” is supported by the US non-profit organization DuraSpace, under whose aegis the “DSpace” community is organized. The new “DSpace Konsortium Deutschland” raises funds for the development of the software, forwards the funds to DuraSpace and in return is given a say in the administration of the project. The founding of the new consortium in Germany makes the focus of the project much more international. Previously, 50 percent of “DSpace” members were from the USA. Currently 28 members are from the USA, 25 from Germany and 34 from the rest of the world – including Finland, the United Kingdom, Peru, Portugal and Switzerland. In addition to TU Berlin, the Berlin “DSpace” membership also includes FU Berlin, HU Berlin and the Medical Library of the Charité.

“The founding of the consortium is another important step for us towards achieving open access,” says Jürgen Christof. “It enables us to make a significant contribution to the financing and development of the open source community. This reflects the commitment to contribute actively to open source projects which the TU Berlin University Library made in its open access policy.”

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