ALAN LEE WILLIAMS: May 2009 Archives

I attended the Open Repositories 2009 Conference in Atlanta, GA this week.  It certainly has been an interesting experience. So, what is Open Repositories?  That's a bit hard to answer in one sentence.  Even their website http://openrepositories.org/ does not explain other than to say they have a conference each year.  It appears to be a group of people who have several strong beliefs about how to build repositories for universities, libraries and research institutions.  They believe in open source, open access and sharing of ideas about how to make all that happen.  The people who attend are a mix of Librarians (information science), Researchers, Computer Science people who are interested in repositories, Application Developers who create these repositories and the various companies that supply repository services.  There are three main repository players here: Fedora Commons, DSpace and EPrints.  This year Microsoft Research joined in with a free offering called Zentity that extends Microsoft Office 2008 to build, access and modify a hosted repository. 

One of the big news items at this conference was the merger of Fedora Commons and DSpace into a single not for profit company called DuraSpace.  The sessions range from vendor presentations, to presentations about repository design, and includes presentations by developers about how they build some applications.  There is a group of the applications developers who attend (or not) who actively build and contribute code for the the three main players. 

I took a lot of notes during the conference, and started to post them on the DLT Department wiki, but as I gathered more information, I decided to put the notes in my personal space because I think the information may be of use to more than just the DLT department.  They notes are at Open Repositories 2009