This is the August 2017 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.
Call for Action
Fedora is designed, built, used, and supported by the community. An easy and important way that you can contribute to the effort is by helping resolve outstanding bugs. If you have an interest in gaining a better understanding of the Fedora code base, or a specific interest in any of these bugs, please add a comment to a ticket and we can work together to move your interest forward.
Membership
Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of DuraSpace members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. The 2016 membership campaign concluded with $564,750 in funding and 74 members. The 2017 membership campaign kicked off in May, and so far the Fedora project has raised $524,750 from 67 members. The annual goal this year is $580,000, so we are over 90% of the way there. We will continue to coordinate with members of the Fedora Leadership Group to expand the pool of DuraSpace members supporting the Fedora project and build a sustainable funding base for the future. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us!
New Members
We would like to thank the University of Michigan Medical School for joining as a Bronze member in support of Fedora. As the basis of their new Knowledge Grid platform, Fedora plays an import role in their services. We are thrilled to have them as a new member! For more information on membership and benefits please see the DuraSpace website.
Training
Fedora and Samvera Camp UK
There is still time to register for the upcoming Fedora and Samvera (formerly Hydra) Camp at Oxford University, Sept 4 - 8, 2017. Co-presented by DuraSpace and Data Curation Experts, and supported by Jisc, the camp will be a great opportunity for a deep dive on Fedora and Samvera topics. Register soon to secure your seat!
Fedora Camp Texas
Fedora Camp Texas, co-hosted by Texas Digital Library and the University of Texas Libraries, will be offered at the University of Texas at Austin's Perry-Castañeda Library in Austin October 16-18, 2017. Training will begin with the basics and build toward more advanced concepts–no prior Fedora experience is required. Participants can expect to come away with a deep dive Fedora learning experience coupled with multiple opportunities for applying hands-on techniques working with experienced trainers and Fedora gurus.
Register today and join us in Austin! An early bird rate is available until August 14 and attendance is limited to the first 40 registrants. Local accommodations are available at a reduced rate.
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
After much discussion and iteration, the initial public working draft of the Fedora API Specification is now available for broader public review.
As described in the specification charter, this specification is designed to:
- Define the characteristics and expectations of how clients interact with Fedora implementations
- Define such interactions such that an implementation’s conformance is testable
- Enable interoperability by striving to minimize the need for modifications to client applications in order to work with different implementations of the Fedora API specification
This announcement for public comment on the initial working draft marks the beginning of a projected four-month period within which time we are targeting the graduation of the specification to “candidate recommendation”. Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments or if you would like to participate in implementation and/or test suite sprints. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
Community-driven Activity
4.7.4 Release
The Fedora 4.7.4 release is now available. It is a backwards compatible refinement of the previous release, which adds a new option to allow a client to overwrite what were previously server-managed triples in order to facilitate lossless import/export operations. This release also allows Amazon S3 to be used as a storage option.
Fedora News Articles
Two recently released Fedora article series are available:
“Fedora 4 in Production” looks into why and how community members are working with Fedora 4 to enhance both collections and workflow at their institutions. The first article in the series features Dan Coughlin, IT Manager, Digital Scholarship and Repository Development, Penn State Libraries, who describes Fedora 4 in production at Penn State ScholarSphere. The second article features Allen Flynn, Research Analyst and Technology Lead at the University of Michigan Medical School, who describes Fedora 4 development of the Knowledge Grid, an open repository of digital knowledge objects aimed at keeping health information accessible and safe at the University of Michigan Medical School and beyond.
The "Contributor Profiles" series recognizes our contributors’ achievements, and introducing them to the rest of the community. The series includes Nick Ruest from York University, Bethany Seeger from Amherst College, Danny Bernstein from DuraSpace, and Aaron Birkland from Johns Hopkins University.
Import/Export Tooling
One of the design goals of Fedora is to simplify the process of both getting your resources into and out of Fedora in a standardized way. This enables the reuse of Fedora resources in other contexts, such as exporting to a separate preservation system, as well as provides a pathway for migrating across Fedora installations. This design goal is being met by an external Import/Export tool that supports transacting in RDF and (optionally) BagIt bags.
A new release of the Import/Export utility based on the work that was accomplished during the last code sprint is now available. Additionally, the related Import/Export Verification tool which is designed to provide assurance that exports from or imports to Fedora were complete and successful is approaching its next milestone release. If you would like to participate as developer, tester, or to write documentation, please contact Andrew Woods.
We would like to thank the following individuals and their institutions for participating in the last sprint:
- Ben Pennell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Bridget Almas, Tufts University
- Danny Bernstein, DuraSpace
- Esmé Cowles, Princeton University
- Harsha Ummerpillai, University of Michigan - ICPSR
- Jim Coble, Duke Univesrity
- Joshua Westgard, University of Maryland
- Kieran Etienne, Penn State University
- Longshou Situ, University of California, San Diego
- Michael Durbin, University of Virginia
- Youn Noh, Yale University
Conferences and events
In an attempt to simplify the task of keeping up with Fedora-related meetings and events, a Fedora calendar is available to the community as HTML and iCal .
Previous Events
VIVO Conference
The annual VIVO conference brought together users, managers and developers from around the world to share the latest developments in semantic web academic profiles. This year's conference featured a workshop on Fedora and a session on integrating VIVO with Fedora. Stay tuned for opportunities to participate in this effort!
Upcoming Events
IFLA WLIC
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) takes place August 19-25 in Wrocław, Poland. The congress will be preceded by several satellite events. David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, will attend the congress to present a paper on Fedora and digital preservation, as well as a Data Curator’s Roles and Responsibilities satellite meeting to present a paper on Fedora and research data.
