Art Pasquinelli's Library Community Preservation Archives Library

A very good review of the recent PASIG and iPres meetings in San Francisco has been posted by Chris Rusbridge, Director, Digital Curation Centre at University of Edinburgh, at his blog, http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/.

Feel free to link in any other relevant blogs to the www.sun-pasig.ning.com site. I am monitoring new members due to some recent spamming, but other than that it is intended to be an open, collaborative mechanism.

Upcoming Sun Events:

Educause: Sun will be at Educause in Denver, November 3-6. Keith Rajecki and I will be at the booth representing PASIG. We will be giving separate booth space to Carol Minton Morris and Michele Kimpton from DuraSpace and Versatile repesentatives who are working closely with Islandora. Kevin Roebuck from Sun will be available to discuss the directions we are taking in Immersive Technology. Ex Libris will also be exhibiting separately at Educause for any of you interested in Rosetta. For more on the Sun Educause activities see the write-up at bottom.

MCN: Sun will be exhibiting at the Museum Computer Network Conference in Portland, November 11-13. This is our first entry into a broad museum venue. I believe some of the standard configurations and bundles being driven via the PASIG members will be of use to this community. But any advice is appreciated!

SAM User Meeting: Sun will also be hosting a six hour Storage Archive Manager (SAM) User meeting in Portland on November 16. This event is tied to Supercomputing 2009. Anyone interested should email Margaret Hamburger at margaret.hamburger@sun.com.

DCC: Keith Rajecki and I will be at the Digital Curation Conference in London December 2-4. Sun is a sponsor. This will be a growing focus area for Sun due to our unique position in both the Research Library and High Performance Computing (HPC) arenas.

With Sun's impressive anytime, anywhere learning, we invite you to come by our booth #415 to get a Java Smart Card and test drive the latest in Ultra-Thin client technology. Visit our booth and meet our team to learn more about exciting, innovative technologies in the areas of:

1. Virtualized Desktops to reduce costs and deliver anytime / anywhere learning

2. Immersive education for tomorrow's learning environment – today!

3. Administrative computing on Sun with Peoplesoft, Banner Unified Digital Campus, or Kuali

4. Identity Management including implementation services from AegisUSA

5. Preservation, Archiving and Repositories for Education and Research Institutions featuring DuraSpace, Fedora, and Islandora

6. Sun Learning Exchange, an interactive, on demand repository for teaching and learning materials

7. Community participation and discussion around EduConnection, Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group, and the Immersive Special Interest Group

Additionally, we welcome you to come and learn how Sun and Oracle partnered to create the fastest OLTP database server on the planet – the Exadata 2. Delivering an extreme performance with Sun’s new innovative Flashfire technology, systems from Sun, software from Oracle, equal a winning solution.

While at the conference, take a tour of Sun's 'Green IT' facility at the Sun Broomfield Campus.

Learn more »

Get a FREE iTouch by booking an appointment for a demonstration at the EDUCAUSE event. To schedule, email us at: education_info@sun.com

We had a great meeting last week at the Sun PASIG in San Francisco October 7-9. We had about 170 attendees (including many new ones) and the practical architecture-focused topics dovetailed very well with the discussions held at iPres October 5-6. I would like to thank Mike Keller from Stanford for moderating, Peggy Taylor for handling the logistics of the event, and all the speakers for their contributions. I think it was the best yet and I think - after 2 1/2 years - we have reached a higher level of value and maturity as we are now discussing very tangible directions and Community offerings and bundles going forward.

1. Presentations: All the presentations are now available at www.sun-pasig.ning.com.

2. Attendees: The attendee list can be viewed at https://meeting-reg.com/sunpasig/.

3. The Website: I will be updating the website next week and adding new content from both Sun and PASIG institutions. While I have tried to keep the site completely open, due to some recent spamming, I will now approve all members as they come in.

4. Survey Responses: We had 60 survey responses with a pretty much unanimous vote that attendees would come back to another PASIG. There was a lot of interest in Solution Sets and Bundles, Storage Archive Manager (SAM), ZFS, and Enterprise Storage, which remain core focus areas of the PASIG. Making Peer Connections was the lead reason listed for attending with Sun Technology, Project Updates, and New Vendor Technologies all closely following and of equal interest.

People loved the content, but felt it was a bit overwhelming. The expanse of the agenda is solely my fault as I wanted to fit in all the submissions. Future meeting formats and content outreach will address this (see below).

5. Directions from the Meeting:

A. Oracle: PASIGers were very upbeat about the Oracle acquisition and see the PASIG as a mechanism to educate Oracle on Digital Library, Repository, and Preservation issues. One of the new areas that emerged was the explicit link many university members are making between Campus Administrative applications (mainly Oracle's) and student/researcher academic content; Scholarly materials, Electronic Theses, Dissertations (ETD), and eResearch publications. There was a surprisingly large and motivated contingent involved in this, so I expect this will be a new collaborative PASIG direction we will take.

B. Clouds, Cloud Services, and SAM: There is a lot of interest in Sun offering a cloud service/service layer via the PASIG Community.  There was also a lot of interest in accessing storage in the cloud via Sun's Storage Archive Manager (SAM). The SAM technical team, Keith Rajecki, and I will look into this and keep everyone updated. We are just starting to talk with member institutions about this idea.

C. New Services: Peer review meetings, on-site peer trainings, architectural peer reviews at the PASIG events, and a more generalized training were discussed as possible PASIG-branded offerings to the broader Digital Library Community.

D. Repository 2.0 Working Group: Related to the development of services the PASIG could offer, Tom Cramer at Stanford and Neil Jefferies at Oxford have set up a PASIG Repository 2.0 Working Group. This is focused on sharing best practices around design ideas, lessons learned, and success stories. This group will foster a holistic approach to service that includes service definition, information classification, contracts, business practice, auditing, reporting, and sustainability. An email will go out to the PASIG alias asking for participants soon.

E. The Next Meeting: Respondents realize they are under travel budget constraints but felt there was a need to definitely have the next one in Europe and keep our back-and-forth cadence every six months. Since Open Repositories 2010 is in Madrid in July and doesn't lend itself to piggybacking due to its length, I think we will need to pick a date in May 2010.

The main meeting outline will change. We will probably initiate the next meeting with a two track intro day focused on 1) a developer SW code sharing meeting, and 2) a Bootcamp focused on Repository Overviews, Solutions, Sun Technology, key OAIS Architectures. The main program will be new and advanced PASIG content, panels, and working groups. We may also have an add-on day for peer review meetings. A poster venue was also discussed as an option as was a mechanism to publicize solution partners better at the meeting.

F. Regional PASIG Events: The Sun Field and PASIG members are interested in having collaborative regional PASIG events. I think these will work well as 'feeder' and 'follow-on' venues for the semi-annual global events in Europe and N. America. We had our first in Washington, DC in September and will have another in Boston for New England institutions December 10 (Contact scott.talpey@sun.com for information).

G. Evolution of Themes Within the PASIG: While the interest in linking academic materials to administrative applications was unexpected and fortuitous, several themes continued to grow at this PASIG event. These included 1) Preserving and Curating Massive eResearch Datasets, 2) Digital Asset Mgt. (DAM) Architectures, 3) Providing Services and Bundles for Smaller Knowledge Institutions, 4) Web Archiving, 5) Cloud Computing for Preservation Purposes, and 6) Specific Archival Solutions for Archives. Additionally, about 25 attendees stayed for Kevin Roebuck's deep-dive on Project Wonderland and Immersive Technologies. So, there is interest in this from some knowledge institutions wanting to develop state-of-the-art web access to their materials
(http://sun-isig.ning.com/).

H. Where's Art?: If anyone wants to meet with me to discuss PASIG issues, I will be at Educause November 3-5 in Denver, the Museum Computer Network meeting November 11-13 in Portland, and the Digital Curation Meeting in London Dec. 2-4. I expect Keith Rajecki, Sun Education Solutions Architect, will be at these events too for technical discussions around solution architectures.