1. PASTA Updates 2013-14

2. Work in progress… NIS Data Portal UI improvements – The website meets and or exceeds standards for accessibility by persons with disabilities: Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative; – The website meets general guidelines for industry acceptable functionality and aesthetics; and – The website provides specific functionality to meet the needs of data providers and data consumers

3. More work in progress… Integration of the DataONE Generic Member Node into PASTA – Development of the PASTA adapter for the GMN is basically complete, but deployment and policy/procedures are still being planned User registration/data policy compliance – Add support for new user registration and compliance with the LTER Data Policy

4. More work in progress… Support for LTER groups/roles into PASTA system authentication and authorization – Integrate LTER Personnel Database groups/roles services into PASTA for associating individual users with LTER groups/roles as stored in the LTER Personnel Database

5. More work in progress… Improve data package browse functionality – Revise data package browse functionality to integrate controlled vocabulary so that categories are of finer granularity and cross-referenced through LTER's dynamic vocabulary tools

6. Work to come soon… Support of other identity providers – Add support for users to login using other authentication systems - federated authentication (e.g., InCommon Federation, OpenID/OAuth - Google, Yahoo!, Facebook).

7. Work on the horizon… Metacat replacement and related search capability – Replace current metadata search functionality with a new search functionality that improves the quality of search results and overall performance. Technology that will be investigated is Apache Solr/Lucene and native XML Databases (e.g., BaseX or eXist-db)

8. Work when we can do it… Quality check process and new quality checks – Continue to improve the number and fidelity of PASTA quality checks for metadata and data quality and metadata/data congruence Overall system hardening, performance tuning, and debugging