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Today Wanda, Barry, Molly (K), Leslie, JP, Tim, and Erik attended a webinar offered through Sun Microsystems on the DuraCloud system. The presentation included Michele Kimpton, Martin Kalfatovic, Barbara Taranto, and Peter Pinch who talked about their beta projects and included a short discussion on how libraries can participate in the DuraCloud pilot program.

The session began with an overview of the experience of the first stage pilot partners. The overview included a discussion of several providers including Amazon, Atmos, Rackspace. While the initial project is focusing on the nuts and bolts of building a cloud-based repository it is also including some interesting open source services include Djakota, Taxon-finder, and Kaltura. For example, Martin talked about the Biodiversity Heritage Library and their experience with the DuraCloud pilot. They were interested in the Taxon-finder service in particular with a focus on making taxonomic literature available. Barbara talked about how their perspective on the pilot included developing a cost comparison model, examine data transfer, management, and transfer. Barbara reported on the migration from the jpeg standard to djakota JPEG 2000 image files. Peter talked about the efforts of WGBH (which completely rocks in general) to digitize archives during the pilot project. The are experimenting with Kaltura player for streaming and are looking at preservation services.

In the late spring the DuraCloud project will be opened up for other libraries to participate. At the moment they are looking to launch a production service in Q3 2010. Initial pilot partnerships will focus on those running dspace/fedora right now. Many thanks to Barry for setting the webinar up in the screening room!