This is the March 2018 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. We will be kicking off our 2018 membership campaign in the Spring but it's never too early to join or upgrade your membership! If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us today!
Fedora Camp at NASA
You are invited to join experienced trainers at Fedora Camp to be held May 16-18 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. Fedora Camp offers everyone a chance to dive in and learn all about the latest version of Fedora. 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.
The instructor team will include experienced community members and the DuraSpace Fedora team:
- Danny Bernstein, DuraSpace
- Esmé Cowles, Princeton University
- Josh Westgard, University of Maryland
- David Wilcox, DuraSpace
- Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
Register today and take advantage of an early bird discount available until March 16. Attendance is limited to the first 30 registrants.
Getting Started with Fedora Webinar
The slides and recording of this 1-hour Fedora webinar are now available. Originally delivered on February 28, this presentation provided an overview of the software and basic concepts, examples of deployments, and an overview and demonstration of the core and extended features. We also discussed the Fedora community, ways to get involved, and how Fedora can help your organization access and preserve your digital content. Keep an eye out for more DuraSpace webinars in the near future!
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The Candidate Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still available for public review.
As described in the 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
The core HTTP and notification services defined in this specification are listed below, along with the associated standards from which they are derived:
- Resource Management (Linked Data Platform)
- Resource Versioning (Memento)
- Resource Authorization (Web Access Controls)
- Notifications (Activity Streams)
- Extended Binary Resource Operations
- Fixity (HTTP headers)
- Referenced Content via message/external-body Content-Type
The public comment period for the Candidate Recommendation will remain open until the Spring, after which we are targeting the release of the full Recommendation. Minimum requirements for transitioning to releasing the Recommendation include:
- Specification compliance test suite
- Two or more implementations of the specification
- No unresolved, outstanding critical issues, as defined by the specification editors
Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
Community-driven Activity
4.7.5 Release
Fedora 4.7.5 was released on February 12. This is a backwards compatible refinement of the previous release, focused on bug fixes, enhancements and deprecation flagging.
Alignment with API Specification
As part of the completion of the Fedora API specification, the current implementation will need to be brought into alignment with the documented specification. To this end, we are scheduling code sprints to complete the alignment work. There will be two sprints, of two weeks each:
- Weeks of March 5 and 12
- Weeks of April 16 and 23
This is an extremely important milestone for the Fedora project. If you are interested and available to participate in either or both of these sprints, please add your name to the sprint planning page.
Oxford Common Filesystem
The second OCFL call took place on Friday, January 19. Notes, video, and audio are available online. This call featured a review of the HathiTrust storage architecture, a review of the OCFL discussion paper, and a discussion on how to move toward a community draft of the Oxford Common Filesystem Layout. To this end, we are collecting use cases in a GitHub repository. The next meeting will be March 9th at 11am ET (US). Please join the pasig-discuss mailing list for further updates.
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 .
Additionally, thanks to the community contribution of Michael B. Klein from Northwestern University, the fedora-project Slack workspace now has a self-registration form. Come join the conversation!
Upcoming Events
West Coast Samvera Regional Meeting
The Digital Services Division of the Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno (Fresno State) is hosting the 2018 West Coast Samvera Regional Group meeting. The event will take place on Friday, March 16, from 9am to 5pm.
Research Data Management Symposium
This International Symposium on The critical role of university Research Data Management infrastructure in transforming data to knowledge will take place in Göttingen, Germany from 18-20 March 2018: it is a collaboration between the University of Göttingen and CODATA and is intended as a precursor event to the RDA plenary meeting in Berlin on 21-23 March 2018. David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, will attend to present on Fedora as research data shared services infrastructure. The event is free but space is limited to please register in advance to attend.
Research Data Alliance 11th Plenary Meeting
The 11th RDA Plenary Meeting will take place from the 21st to the 23rd March 2018 in Berlin, Germany. Under the theme "From Data to Knowledge", the Plenary meeting welcomes the participation of all data scientists, experts and practitioners engaged in the advancement of data-driven science and economy. Fedora-related initiatives include the work being done by the Research Data Repository Interoperability working group to leverage the import/export utility for research data packaging and transmission between repository platforms, and the Repository Platforms for Research Data interest group.
LDCX
LDCX 2018, taking place March 26-28, continues the tradition of bring together institutions and technologists with common needs and concerns to collaborate at the intersection of cultural heritage and technology. As in previous years, additional meetings will be hosted around LDCX, including a Samvera Developers Congress, a Samvera Partners meeting, and the LOCKSS Alliance Meeting (both held March 29-30, 2018). Registration is $100 per person, which includes breakfast, snacks, lunches, and evening refreshments.
CNI
The CNI Spring Meeting will take place April 12-13 in San Diego, CA. Representatives from CNI member organizations gather twice annually to explore new technologies, content, and applications, to further collaboration, to analyze technology policy issues, and to catalyze the development and deployment of new projects. Each member organization may send two representatives. The program will include an update on the Fedora vision, strategy, and roadmap.
ILIDE
Taking place April 15-18, the Innovative Library in Digital Era conference will present visionary and original ideas based on the extensive experience of the participating experts and institutions. This year's program will include an update on current Fedora developments and future plans. Please register in advance to attend.
Digital Initiatives Symposium
The annual Digital Initiatives Symposium will take place April 23-24 at the University of California, San Diego. This day-and-a-half conference focuses on the digital elements of library ecosystems and features workshops and user group meetings for a variety of institutional repository platforms. The agenda will include a Fedora User Group meeting. Please register in advance to attend.
Southern Miss IR Conference
The Southern Miss IR Conference will take place April 26-27 at the University of Southern Mississippi. It is an opportunity for Institutional Repository (IR) managers to come together and learn about new ideas and strategies that their colleagues are using at their institution to meet the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. The conference will include a Fedora demo and a presentation on selecting an open source IR platform. Please register in advance to attend.
Previous Events
IDCC18
The 13th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC18) took place February 19-22, 2018. Fedora Product Manager David Wilcox offered a workshop entitled Supporting FAIR Data Principles with Fedora on Monday, February 19. A report from the conference is now available.
