I came back from dinner tonight to find a large fire truck, ambulance, and police car pulled up in front of my hotel. My first thought after, “Oh no, my Mac!” was that if something involving fire trucks happens at the Menger, they can just blame it on the ghosts and be done with it, without any negative impact on business. I haven’t seen any ghosts yet myself, although the water did sputter a lot when I first turned the tap on. In any case, as you may have surmised, the hotel was not, in fact, on fire and my Mac is fine.
The Open Repositories sessions have so far been pretty interesting. Since Binghamton doesn’t actually have a repository, I was hoping concerned that the user group sessions, which comprise the first day of the conference, might be over my head so I could go to La Villita. Some of the details in the presentations were pretty specific, but one theme has quickly emerged: taking repositories beyond being, well, repositories and developing them to actively support the research process and provide an interactive and social environment.
Examples:
- The National Science Digital Library’s Fedora platform works with WordPress, MediaWiki, and Connotea to create a “living library” for science, technology, engineering, and math.
- The eSciDoc project of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe supports collaborative authoring.
- Rice University has adapted DSpace for its digitized collections, as well as using it for “born-digital” stuff, so they can provide unified access to various types of digital materials. See their digital collections.
- Coming up tomorrow Georgia Tech will discuss its new services that are associated with DSpace; you can read about it today at DLib.