From Michele Mennielli, International Membership and Partnership Manager for DuraSpace
On July 18, 2018 CONCYTEC (the Peruvian National Council for Science, Technology and Innovation) hosted the first DSpace workshop in Peru as a pre-conference event during the National Conference on Research Information. The event was most likely the most attended DSpace workshop ever organized, with over 160 attendees present in the room and 120 additional people following the training online.
Together with the DSpace training session delivered by Joan Caparros from CSUC (the Catalan Consortium of Universities), DuraSpace had the opportunity to collaborate with other international organizations to provide a broader view on the future of repositories in general, and specifically on future enhancements to DSpace. Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director of COAR gave a presentation about COAR’s Next Generation Repositories to introduce how DSpace is implementing such recommendations. The afternoon was dedicated to a training on DSpace-CRIS provided by 4Science.
During the two days Conference following the DSpace Workshop, CONCYTEC presented to more than 500 representatives of universities and national institutions from all over Peru, the project of implementing a central research information management system (CRIS) for the country. Speakers from different international organizations such as DuraSpace, euroCRIS, COAR, ORCID, LA Referentia presented their views and activities related to the research information and scholarly ecosystem, discussing about interoperability issues and standards, and presenting best practices from around the world (including presentation from CINECA and the Pontificia Universidad Católica the Chile).
In Peru there are 158 DSpace repository currently running and the event was an important opportunity for DuraSpace to meet with our community of users, to listen to and learn what are their needs and expectations.
At DuraSpace we look forward to keep collaborating with CONCYTEC to support the Peruvian DSpace community and to share their activities and achievements with the rest of the world.