The CollectionSpace team is pleased to announce the release of CollectionSpace Version 1.8. This release adds support for media handling, hierarchical vocabularies, storage location authority, delete, import, export, and groups. Significant changes under the hood include improvements to performance, increased support for localization, simplification of configuration, and upgrade of the core platform to use PostgreSQL. Initial development work in support of batch processing was started. Development efforts also included increased support for multi-tenancy, or the means by which a single CollectionSpace instance can support disparate tenants. This work is foundational to supporting CollectionSpace in a hosted environment. Finally, the entire application underwent full regression quality assurance testing and many of our early adopters provided critical feedback throughout the process. The CollectionSpace team would like to thank everyone who participated in the QA testing process. Your feedback was instrumental in our ability to locate problems and efficiently resolve them. *Try CollectionSpace v1.8 at demo.collectionspace.org. *<http://demo.collectionspace.org/> The online demo now offers two different CollectionSpace configurations - CollectionSpace demo core (the out-of-the-box configuration) and CollectioSpace demo for life sciences (an example of how CollectionSpace might be configured for use with life science collections). These very different configurations are provided as a way of demonstrating how different communities are able to configure CollectionSpace to meet their specific needs. Additional configuration examples will be provided in the months to come for fine arts, digital and variable media, and anthropology. Follow our functional requirements development and release process via the project roadmap: http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Road+Map+to+2.0 NOTE: This release completed full regression quality assurance testing on Windows XP, Windows 7, and Mac OSX with Chrome and Firefox 3.6 and 4 browsers. There is a known bug preventing the use of CollectionSpace via Internet Explorer 8, although the system performs as expected with Internet Explorer 9. A patch is currently being developed and will be released in the near future. -- Megan Forbes CollectionSpace Project Manager www.collectionspace.org Museum of the Moving Image 36-01 35 Avenue Astoria, NY 11106 movingimage.us 718 777 6800