At the fall CNI meeting this week, the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) initiative released its public alpha draft documents; I've reproduced an annoucement from Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel below. I also want to note the two launch events for the ORE specifications -- March 3, 2008 at Johns Hopkins, and April 4, at the University of Southampton in conjunction with Open Repositories 2008 -- mentioned in the announcement below.

I'm delighted to see the progress on this important activity, and urge you to review and comment on the specifications.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI

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We are pleased to announce the public alpha release of the OAI Object
Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) User Guide and Specification documents.
These are now available at http://openarchives.org/ore/toc.

These documents are the result of over a year of effort by a large group
of people. We now seek your feedback on their contents, as part of our
effort to transition these documents to beta and then final production
release.

We have set up a Google Group to discuss these documents. We welcome
your comments there, and request your help in keeping these comments and
the resulting discussion productive and focused. The URL of the Google
Group is http://groups.google.com/group/oai-ore. You will also find this
URL in the header note in the OAI-ORE documents.

You may also send mail to ore at openarchives.org, but we request you use
this only for private comments to the editors. Our goal is to keep this
discussion public.

Finally, we'd like to remind you of two upcoming events related to OAI-ORE:

1. March 3rd 2008, John Hopkins University: USA ORE Open Meeting.
Register at http://www.regonline.com/oai-ore (limited to 150). Supported
by Microsoft.

2. April 4th 2008, University of Southampton: European ORE Open Meeting.
In conjunction with Open Repositories 2008. Registration not yet
available. Supported by JISC.

Greetings

Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel on behalf of the OAI-ORE effort