The CollectionSpace team is pleased to announce a major upgrade of the CollectionSpace Services Architecture in conjunction with the integration of the highly anticipated release of version 5.5 of the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (scheduled for release in mid-November 2011). The Nuxeo Enterprise Platform provides repository and content management services as a key component of the CollectionSpace framework. In the past year, Nuxeo have changed their recommended default configuration from the JBoss platform to a leaner stack based just upon Apache and Tomcat. Accordingly, and to realize similar benefits in CollectionSpace, the development team has been working to reconfigure the services stack to follow this leaner model. It is important to note that due to the design of the CollectionSpace framework, these critical changes will not affect the services APIs in any way. Our REST model abstracts our functionality, as intended, and insulates the rest of the system from the changes we are making at the Services Architecture level. In addition, these foundation-level changes will not impact the repository configuration, database model, import scripts, reports, etc. In addition to the architectural improvements, the development team have worked with the Nuxeo developers on some key improvements to the Nuxeo platform and version 5.5 of the Nuxeo Enterprise Platform will enable significant new functionality. These improvements, together with the major effort made by the CollectionSpace core development team, will bring significant benefits to CollectionSpace including: • a reduced memory footprint which will improve performance by making more memory available for database, caching and other memory-intensive tasks • a simplified (and smaller) tarball for distribution • a reduction in the skills required to tune and administer CollectionSpace • a simplified programming environment for ongoing services development • powerful new search facilities added to the repository abstractions The CollectionSpace development schedule has been aligned with the Nuxeo development schedule for several years now. The mid-November Nuxeo release date, however, is coming at a time when we had originally planned to roll-out a major new version of CollectionSpace. As a result of the scheduling clash, the Services Architecture work, the significance of the Nuxeo upgrade and the time required to integrate it into CollectionSpace, we have decided to delay the release of CollectionSpace v2.0 until after the Nuxeo upgrade is completed. We anticipate a release date for CollectionSpace v2.0 in mid-December 2011. A follow-up announcement will be posted to this list with additional details in the coming weeks. CollectionSpace is a collaborative effort driven by museum and higher education professionals. Our goals are two-fold: 1. Work together as a community to develop a well designed, cost effective, high quality software application that museums and related heritage organizations can use to manage their collections and share information about those collections online and 2. Re-define the ways in which collections information is collected, managed, preserved, leveraged, and published. CollectionSpace is freely distributed via the ECL 2.0 license, and an active developer community is working to enhance and improve CollectionSpace with each new release. This effort is led by the Museum of the Moving Image, with partners University of California, Berkeley, Information Services and Technology and University of Cambridge, Center for Applied Research in Educational Technologies. Additional development resources are provided by OCAD University, The Fluid Project. Our implementer community includes: Museum of the Moving Image, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (UC Berkeley), The University and Jepson Herbaria (UC Berkeley), History of Art Visual Arts Resources Collection (UC Berkeley), Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark), Walker Art Center, and Miami-Dade County, Department of Cultural Affairs, Art in Public Places, Digital Collection Initiative. For more information, to get involved, or to take a guided tour through CollectionSpace, please visit us at www.collectionspace.org or email us at collectionspace@movingimage.us. CollectionSpace is made possible by the visionary support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.