Welcome to a special edition of the Fedora Newsletter. We have dedicated May as Membership Awareness Month in hopes that you will join us in celebrating, highlighting and showcasing our member institutions throughout the month. Stay tuned to our communication channels all month to learn more about what it means to be a Fedora member.
Fedora Membership: We are strong because of our people!
Membership Awareness Month
Welcome to our first ever Membership Awareness Month. Throughout the month we will be highlighting and celebrating everything to do with Fedora membership - from showcasing institutions to sharing success stories. It’s all about our members!
Each week we will have a special activity planned with prizes at the end for participating! All the details can be found here.
Membership Awareness Month Activities
Do you like prizes? Who doesn’t?! Each week we will be releasing a new activity that you can participate in for a chance to win a prize at the end of the month. Each activity will earn you ballots and at the end we will randomly select a winner from the ballot entries. The more you participate, the more ballots you earn!
- To kick things off, at the end of this newsletter there is a link to a google form with a quick trivia question to answer based on the info shared throughout. The form will only remain open until Friday, May 7th, 2021. Correctly answering the question will earn you 1 ballot.
- Your second chance to earn a ballot is to share this newsletter with someone (or group of individuals) who may not already be receiving it - think prospective community members or colleagues who want to learn more about Fedora. Simply forward it along and then let me know by email (arran.griffith@gmail.com) you’ve done it. This will be on the honor system, so please be considerate. Completing this task will earn you 1 ballot.
- Want your institution featured as part of Membership Awareness Month? Fill out this quick form to have your institution highlighted and shared throughout the community and via our social media channels!
As always, Fedora is an open-source, community-supported program funded entirely by membership contributions. This funding supports staff to work on developing, teaching, engaging and supporting Fedora users across the globe. Without our members, we would not be able to support the preservation of the vital content contained within the repositories of our users. Find out how you can help. Learn more and become a member today!
Fedora 6.0 Technology Update
The Fedora Tech Team and our Governance Group collaboratively devised a tentative (and conservative) timeline for the Production Release for Fedora 6.0. Based on the work left to complete and ensuring we are delivering a performant and stable release, here is the current timeline:
- Now - Late May - continue to finish off WIP items and low-hanging fruit
- Late May - cut release candidate
- 2-3 week testing phase post-candidate release
- 2 week buffer period in case things come up during the testing phase
- Late June - Production Release
Member Highlights
Fedora User Group Meetings
We had the pleasure of hosting 2 Online Fedora User Group Meetings recently - one in March for those in European time zones and one in April for those in North American time zones. Both meetings showcased incredible progress and development from institutions from all across our community and we are extremely grateful to have been able to engage with users.
Recordings of all the panel sessions are available on our YouTube Channel here, and links to the agenda’s and slide presentations are available on the wiki here:
Workshops
In March we also held our first workshop of 2021 - Intro to Fedora 6.0 hosted by LYRASIS Learning. This was a free workshop aimed at introducing individuals with little to no prior Fedora knowledge to the software and providing a hands-on session in working with Fedora. Registration was opened to all members first in advance of public access and we are happy to report that we reached our maximum capacity! If you are interested in watching the content from the workshop, the video is publicly available here.
In June we will be hosting our second workshop, again offering early registration access to members first. This will be a migration workshop providing participants an overview of the Fedora 3.x to 6.0 migration path, including a detailed walk-through of the migration-utils and fcrepo-migration-validator. It is hosted by LYRASIS Learning and will be free to attend thanks to the IMLS Grant Pilot Project. Keep your eyes open for registration opportunities.
LYRASIS Learning and Fedora
In April we announced a brand new benefit available to our member institutions at the silver tier or higher. All staff at a subscribing institution can now access a 15% discount on the annual subscription fee for LYRASIS Learning.
Your institution can subscribe to LYRASIS Learning to receive unlimited access to our live, online classes and our Learning Library of recorded sessions. View our schedule of upcoming live sessions, and check out the over 250 classes available on-demand in the Learning Library.
IMLS Grant Update: Fedora Migration Paths and Tools
This grant (lg-246264-ols-20) is focused on developing, piloting, and documenting migration tools and paths for upgrading Fedora 3 repositories to Fedora 6. Fedora staff and the grant partners have been working hard on this project and are pleased to share the following updates in our most recent blog post: https://duraspace.org/fedora-migration-paths-and-tools-project-update-april-2021/
Stay tuned for future updates!
Communications
Demo Videos:
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay connected to the Fedora community.
Blog:
Fedora 6.0: A Migration Story - The Berlin State Library - Dr. Oliver Schöner sits down with us to share his migration success story moving their Fedora repository to 6.0.
Coming Up Next…
Stay tuned this month for the following:
Fedora at Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL) 2021 - David Wilcox will be facilitating an Intro to Fedora workshop. Join him as he walks attendees through the basics of Fedora and our current development progress. We have also been accepted to showcase a digital poster entitled All Aboard: Bringing the Community Forward to Fedora 6.0 during the conference, so look for us during the poster sessions as well.
Conferences & Events
In an effort to consolidate conference information for all community members, we have created an active Conferences section on the wiki which can be accessed at any time here. Our goal is to keep this as up-to-date as possible to provide a single source of information surrounding on-going conferences and workshops.
Upcoming Conferences
- Open Repositories 2021 - June 7-10, 2021 (Online)
Membership Awareness Month Trivia - Click here to answer a trivia question and earn your first ballot entry!
Get Involved
Fedora is designed, built, used, and supported by the community. If you want to get involved but don’t know where to start, dropping in to one of our weekly Tech calls is a great place to meet the team and find out what we’re working on. You can find more details here.
Register Your Repository
Is your repository listed in the registry? Help us maintain reliable information on the community of Fedora users around the world by registering your repository today. You can also request an update to an existing entry by selecting your entry and filling out the online form.
