This is the January 2019 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 began our annual membership campaign with a goal of raising $570,000, and we concluded the year with $529,625 which is 93% of our goal! This funding pays for staff to work on the project and provide technical leadership, direct strategic planning, organize community outreach, and coordinate timely software releases. Membership also provides opportunities to participate in project governance and influence the direction of the software. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us today!

Designing a Migration Path Grant Update

The Designing a Migration Path grant work proceeded in December with an in-person meeting of the advisory group at the National Library of Medicine. Notes from the meeting are available on the wiki. The group reviewed the results of the environmental scan and discussed how best to create and disseminate the survey. 

Keep an eye on this newsletter for monthly updates on our progress.

Software development 

Standards

Fedora API Specification

The Proposed Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still available for public review.

This release should be considered stable. No other updates are expected before the official 1.0 Recommendation.

Minimum requirements for releasing the 1.0 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

Fedora 5.0.0 Release

The focus of this major release is alignment of the Fedora codebase with the Fedora API Specification.  While the code behind basic CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete) changed only incrementally from the previous release (4.7.5),  Versioning and Access Control functionality underwent major refactorings. Per the Fedora API Specification, this release of the Fedora application implements the following underlying specifications:

Download Fedora 5.0.0.

294 JIRA issues were worked by fifteen developers for this release.  In addition, we also developed the Fedora API Test Suite which can be run against this release to verify compliance with the aforementioned specification.  Finally, the documentation underwent a full overhaul with special attention to the modifications to the API changes, additions, deletions, deprecations, configuration settings, and a new User's Guide focused on content modeling and metadata recommendations.

We would particularly like to thank the following people and their institutions for their extensive contributions in terms of code development,  documentation, issue resolution, testing, and code review:

Fedora 5.x Documentation

In tandem with the 5.0 release, we are reviewing and updating the project documentation. Creating and maintaining accurate and up-to-date documentation is equally as important as software development, so please contribute to this effort. 

Oxford Common File Layout

A 0.1 (Alpha) release of the OCFL spec was recently announced. You are invited to provide feedback, which will be discussed on the next community call on January 9.

The most recent OCFL call took place on Wednesday, November 14. Notes and audio are available online. This call included an open question regarding support for empty directories, interest in a machine-readable means for identifying storage hierarchy pattern, and a roadmap for the specification. Please join the ocfl-community 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 .

If you have not already joined the fedora-project Slack workspace please start by visiting the self-registration form. Come join the conversation!

Upcoming Events

South Central States Fedora User Group Meeting

The next South Central States Fedora User Group Meeting will be held January 16-17 at the University of Texas at Austin. The meeting will include presentations on current implementations and work underway at peer institutions, discussion for users considering Fedora, and Fedora 5.0 updates and a workshop. This meeting is free to attend but please register in advance.

Past Events

SWIB18

SWIB conference (Semantic Web in Libraries) is an annual conference, held for the 10th time on November 26-28, focusing on Linked Open Data (LOD) in libraries and related organizations. This year's programme featured a Fedora workshop along with a presentation on using Fedora and Islandora CLAW to power linked open data applications. A group of current and prospective Fedora users in the region also met during a breakout for a brief user group meeting.

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