I attended the Open Repositories conference, May 18-21 in Atlanta, which “attempts to create an opportunity to explore the challenges faced by user communities and others in today’s world”. In general, the OR community is very relevant to our work with repositories (for Mellon/OpenVault, Teachers’ Domain, the DAM system, etc), and so many people are facing the same problems with cataloging, preservation, and dissemination. The California Digital Library had a presentation that provided a connection between curation and preservation goals (which I think is something we’re very interested in), saying: Lots of [copies, description, services, uses] keeps stuff [safe, meaningful, useful, valuable]. John Wilbanks, VP of Science at Creative Commons, gave the keynote — “Locks and Gears: Digital Repositories and the Digital Commons” — stressing the importance of Open Data, helps bring together isolated knowledge pools. The ultimate goal is to turn databases into the web, to allow useful “stuff” to happen rather than locking it away. Making this information available, linked, shared could help solve existing problems that lack funding (cure for Huntington’s Disease was one example). The HD Foundation is funding some of the Science Commons’ work opening up genetic databases, and creating semantic web endpoints (with SPARQL) for that data to make it more accessible; Wilbanks had an analogy between the ability to easily edit an HTML page with the ability to easily edit a SPARQL query, which allows for more “hackability” (potentially in the face of copyright or IPR). The OR community is finally starting to think about video material, which makes our appearance very timely, and allowed us to make several excellent connections, both on a technical level — Glasgow’s Spoken Word project, U. of Alberta’s digitization, encoding, and cataloging workflows, Rutgers’ work with NJVid + RUcore to form a state-wide educational video delivery network, etc — but also around content and preservation — the educational TV collection ofIndiana University and a collection at Northwestern. We also connected with a community group interested in creating repository-backed tools for scholarly research, trying to provide solutions and tools to support scholars and make repositories useful and exciting new mediums and doing so in an open manner to “cross-polinate” across disparate groups, which can lead to previously unrealized benefits. There was also a lot of interest around creating multiple, light-weight interfaces to collections to meet the needs of a group of users, rather than “building the death star”. This community seemed split into people using existing applications (Drupal — UPEI among others)) on top of Fedora or building front-ends on top of a framework (PHP/Zend Framework (WGBH, NASA), Ruby on Rails (MediaShelf, Hydra), Django). On the other end, there was interest around Sun’s OpenStorage platform (which apparently will still have life inside Oracle, the iRODs distributed storage repository, and DuraCloud, a cloud/distributed storage abstraction layer for repositories. Tony Hey, VP Microsoft External Research, convinced me that MS isn’t wholly evil, and is trying to do the right thing among scholarly communities by embracing open standards and interoperability (obviously, when it suits them, but still an improvement). They’ve done some great work with MS Office add-ins to connect the suite with institutional repositories. Finally, on Wednesday, MS launched Zentity, their new repository offering build on the MS stack (IIS, MSQL, etc), perhaps useful for institutions to get up and running with a repository; everyone recognizes this is not a new product line, but a research project, and MS is trying to break into a monopolized market. Our presentation was well received, and our poster won the poster session (out of 30+ posters; note: in future posters, specify the pantone/CMYK/etc colors + don’t be afraid of obvious branding).