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As I trundled across Hemisfair park this morning the promised rain began to fall so I was very happy when I found the Rivercenter & got inside. The first two days of Open Repositories is comprised of presentations from users of Dspace, Fedora, and E-prints – three of the largest open source digital library systems in the market. Many of the conversations/presentations so far have commented on the importance of community involvement/participation in digital libraries. One presentation by Dean Krafft talked about integrating social software tools with structured digital repositories and how to involve patrons/users in digital library creation/management. A lunchtime trip to the public library was interesting & resulted in the taking of a few photographs. In the afternoon, a session on E-prints helped underscore (for me) the different perspectives that each of the products bring to the digital library environment. E-prints is interesting in part because it is centered around describing document object types as opposed to describing a fixed metadata standard.

The last session of the day for me (more Fedora) returned to the themes of creating portable code, simplifying complex problems, and finding the right tool for the job. One of the presenters, Matt Zumwalt, talked about his use of Xforms. Tonight it is a receoption (free-drink tickets in hand) and B.B. King…