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August 2, 2010 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

DuraSpace Introduces DuraCloud Open Source

The DuraSpace organization unveiled the open source code for the new DuraCloud platform, a hosted service and open technology that makes it easy for organizations and end users to use cloud services. DuraCloud is an open source platform that is built upon commercial cloud infrastructure. The platform itself deploys into a cloud server environment and is integrated with multiple cloud storage providers, including Amazon AWS and RackSpace. DuraSpace is making the open source code available to enable the community to create new software and services that integrate with the core platform.

Developers who are looking into building applications in the cloud are encouraged to experiment with the DuraCloud code and provide feedback about what they see as development synergies and potential additional features. See the DuraCloud wiki for technical documentation and links to download the code: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/duracloud/DuraCloud.

The DuraCloud open source platform enables cloud storage across multiple commercial and non-commercial providers and offers a cloud-based services framework focused on preservation support and data access for reuse and sharing. Features include replication, image transformation, bit integrity checking, image viewing, media streaming, and general compute processing.

DuraCloud has been in a pilot program phase funded by the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), to utilize and give feedback on the DuraCloud platform since fall 2009. The first three pilot partners identified were New York Public Library, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and WGBH Educational Foundation. These three partners were chosen because they were already managing and preserving large amounts of content in a repository and were facing several challenges where cloud infrastructure could provide a possible solution. The DuraSpace not-for-profit organization will release the DuraCloud service in early 2011.

Source: DuraSpace