Open Repositories 2011 conference

2011-06-20

Open Repositories 2011 conference
Open Repositories 2011 conference was held on June 6-11. It is an important international event for exchange of information about development, management and application of digital repositories.

Over 300 participants, from over 20 countries had opportunity to hear the lectures of such great representatives of IT and digital libraries community as Jim Jagielski and Clifford Lynch. Conference sessions were dedicated to various topics related to digital repositories, including semantic web, tools and standards, long term preservation and social networks.

Conference opening speech was performed by Jim Jagielski, president of Apache Software Foundation. Jim Jagielski described open-source communities organisation and collaboration. He underlined that open-source projects are developed mailny by volunteers, and the key aspect of cooperation is trust between project participants. Bradley McLean from DuraSpace identified key trends for the future of digital repositories: mobile technologies, long term preservation, cloud computing, and mashups. Richard Rodgers from M.I.T. Libraries presented ORCID initiative, which aim is to create a central registry for researchers to solve the problem of author ambiguity.

Many tools, systems and initiatives related to digital repositories were also presented on the conference: Memento, Hathi Trust, DAR, FITS, OTS-Schemas, BatchBuilder, ReDBox and Mint, Exhibit, Fascinator, Recollection, SWORD, CUPID.

On the conference, Tomasz Parkoła from PSNC presented a poster describing the concept of building multiple virtual digital repositories mapped over collections of a shared digital library. Digital repositories are currently an important new trend in the network of Polish digital libraries. The main aim is to increase on-line visibility of contemporary Open Access research works. This kind of activities is also supported by the Integrated Knowledge System developed by PSNC in frame of the SYNAT project.