Developments in the collaboration between Fedora and DSpace are of obvious interest to the Australian repositories community, where the majority of research repositories are powered by one or other of these technologies.
The DuraSpace collaboration has gained a lot of attention since the DSpace and Fedora communities joined forces in 2008. There won’t be a code release for a while that integrates the two but it looks like a number of alliances have been formed and the community has substantially expanded. Eight of Fedora’s eleven code committers are now from the community rather than DuraSpace. The DuraSpace team members are no longer affiliated with their original universities— all now work independently for DuraSpace. And DuraSpace is a nonprofit organisation, which means they’re trying to move away from reliance on grant funding and towards a more sustainable model based on sponsorship and services.
The DuraSpace Strategy
According to Chief Technology Officer Brad McLean, DuraSpace’s mission statement is deliberately broad to allow support for community-led projects that may not directly relate to DSpace or Fedora. One of the objectives for 2010 is to “support more independent user-facing projects such as Blacklight”. This attitude explains DuraSpace’s interest in DepositMO, SWORD, Drupal/WordPress integration at Islandora and a PKP collaboration with the Big Digital Machine at Indiana University.
What about DSpace and Fedora?
DuraSpace still sees DSpace as a “turnkey reference platform for repositories” and a “user experience incubator”, while Fedora is an “easily installed, configured and maintained repository toolkit”. One possible future arrangement that DuraSpace envisages is DSpace running on Fedora running on DuraCloud. However many institutions could take a while to be ready for cloud computing. So for the moment DuraSpace is focussing on a future for DSpace with “Fedora Inside”. The goal is to retain the out-of-the-box experience of DSpace but to benefit from the strengths of the “robust” Fedora architecture.
Tim Donoghue from DSpace makes it clear that DSpace with “Fedora Inside” is still some way off—perhaps 2011 or 2012—as the software will need to go through some intermediary stages first. They’re attempting to follow more predictable release schedules; the next version of DSpace is 1.7, scheduled for December 2010.
One of the most interesting anticipated features in 1.7 (from this repository manager’s point of view) is support for different submission processes based on publication type. The example Donoghue gives here is a separate workflow for depositing theses as opposed to other publication types. This could be really useful for Australian DSpace repositories. Also, DSpace already supports import using SWORD but in 1.7 the developers are also looking at the possibility of exporting data using SWORD, which would theoretically allow DSpace to export to Fedora or to EPrints or perhaps to other repository software.
Brad McLean described how “decoupling of the user interface from workbenches” has already occurred in repositories (see for example Manakin, Blacklight and SWORD), and wonders whether the admin side of repository software will follow the same trend. I think repository managers should welcome any attempts to enhance our admin tools. We’ve focussed first on improving the usability of the end-user interfaces to our systems—this is naturally a matter of urgency—but it’s high time that repositories became easier for repository managers to use, too.
For more information on DuraSpace, see: http://www.duraspace.org/
Copyright Rebecca Parker, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>
