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More rain this morning. . .cold rain & lots of it (The AAA book talked about the dry warm conditions in TX!) The conference kicks off again today with more user group sessions. I’m hoping to skip around a bit this morning to catch up on new Dspace releases & find out where Fedora is heading. In the Dspace presentations yesterday, I noticed a strong theme of locally developed modules/customizations. It was interesting to hear the perspectives on the R&D/development process from this community (one from a programmer & one from a regular user). This morning as I watch Joseph Pawletko talk about how his institution has implemented component products around their DSpace instance in order to create an OAIS modeled repository I am reminded of the comments I heard yesterday regarding the converging nature of digital library/repository applications and the interest/need in commonly identified standards and APIs.

I caught up with Matthew Connolly after his presentation on some research with faculty adoption of institutional repositories upcoming publication in D-lib – March 2007 – I was curious to find out to what extent the results of the study were directing continued use/implementation of DSpace. . .I have spoken with a number of people who are using Dspace both for institutional repositories and digital collection management systems but continue to hear how diverse their applications are. . .I think I have yet to talk with an institution that has turned to one of these applications to fill all of their digital library needs. In the final user group sessions, I jumped around listening to presentations on Manakin (xml/xsl interface platform for Dspace) and was impressed to see some integration with Google Earth from the final presenter – Scott Yeadon, caught up on the continued plans for moving Fedora into a sustainable community development model, and checked in briefly at the E-print 3.0 discussion.