Welcome back to the Fedora Newsletter! We took a little hiatus during the end of summer and early Fall to give everyone a chance to finish off their holidays and settle into the routine of back-to-work. But we’ve got exciting things to share about what we’ve been up to! Make sure to check out all the links provided for additional reading for your interest!
News
Fedora 6.1 Is Here!
Over the last few months the tech team and committers have been hard at work improving the software. Today we are happy to announce the release of Fedora 6.1. In addition to the core software (https://github.com/fcrepo/fcrepo) we have released new and improved versions of the migration and validation tool sets. This round of changes has been focused on bug fixes, performance enhancements.
Details:
Fedora 6.1.1 Core, Fedora 6.1.0 Core
Migration Utils 6.1.0 [Download]
Fedora Upgrade Utils 6.1.0 [Download]
Fedora Migration Validator 1.1.0 [Download]
Fedora Import Export Utility 1.1.0 [Download]
Hats off to our dedicated team of contributors and their institutions:
- Peter Winckles - University of Wisconsin Madison
- Jared Whiklo - University of Manitoba
- Ben Pennell - University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
- Danny Bernstein - Lyrasis
- Mike Ritter - Lyrasis
- Demian Katz - Villanova University
Geoff Scholl - Villanova University - Calvin Xu - National Library of Medicine
- Thomas Bernhart - Docuteam
Fedora Camel Toolbox 6.0.0
We ran a Camel Toolbox Sprint in October during which the following core objectives were reached:
- Upgrade codebase to Camel 3.9.0 (from Camel 2.x)
- Add new the HTTP Forwarding Service
- Remove dependency on the loathed OSGI/Kafka platform
- Simplify packaging by providing a runnable jar with a properties file
- Dockerize the application
- Provide Docker Compose example
Some useful links:
Many thanks to the following community members who participated in this sprint:
Demian Katz - Villanova University
Geoff Scholl - Villanova University
Calvin Xu - National Library of Medicine
Thomas Bernhart - Docuteam
Andy Pfister - Docuteam
Mike Ritter - Lyrasis
Danny Bernstein - Lyrasis
Fedora Technology Survey
Since the release of Fedora 6.0 this past summer, the Dev Team and core committers have been looking for ways to focus their development efforts. We are looking to implement a short-term development cycle with the goal of developing some smaller feature updates or improvements while we continue to iterate on 6.0. The hope is that by implementing the changes you, as the community want, we can increase adoption rates and lower barriers to migrating.
The following survey was sent out at the beginning of November, but we are continuing to accept responses. Please take a moment to fill it out if you have any interest in seeing specific tools developed.
https://forms.gle/mmTDzT7wwfQDt5UD8
As always, if you or your team have interest in working on any of these components, we are always seeking new Committers to join the team. You can start by joining out weekly Tech Calls on Thursdays at 11pm Eastern.
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:
- The University of Virginia pilot is largely complete. The Whitman College team is working with the team at Born Digital to finish up outstanding feature requirements needed before cutting over their repository. With all loose ends nearly tied up and documentation nearing completion, this phase of the pilot is almost wrapped up.
- As we begin to finish up the pilot phase of the grant, we are preparing to share the draft of the migration toolkit with the community for initial feedback. After all initial feedback is received we will review any changes before finalizing the document for the broader community.
While this toolkit will be openly available for anyone to review, we are particularly interested in working with institutions with existing Fedora 3.x repositories that would like to test the tools and documentation and provide feedback to help us improve the resources. If you would like to be more closely involved in this effort please contact Arran Griffith (arran.griffith@lyrasis.org) or Danny Bernstein (daniel.bernstein@lyrasis.org) for more information.
Up Next: Planning for the IMLS Grant-funded Migration Workshop.
Stay tuned for future updates!
Demo Videos
With the release of the Camel Toolbox this month, Demian Katz from Villanova University was instrumental in creating our next demo video outlining how the HTTP Service portion of the Toolbox works. I highly recommend checking out the video here: https://youtu.be/zW-AuC9DtmQ
Fedora in the Community
We have been busy presenting and speaking at numerous conferences and workshops across the community. Here’s what we’ve been up to:
Access 2021
- Danny Bernstein and Arran Griffith presented at Access 2021 at the beginning of October. They gave an overview of the new features in Fedora 6 and touched on the importance of the community in past and on-going development planning.
Samvera Virtual Connect 2021
- We presented at the Samvera Virtual Connect conference in October where we shared success migration stories relevant to the Samvera Community and showed off new Fedora 6.0 features.
DocuTeam Community Day
- DocuTeam asked us to give a presentation at their recent Community Day to speak about OCFL and its role in Fedora 6. They are in the process of migrating many of their clients to Fedora 6. This presentation gave us an opportunity to interact with users outside of North America. We had a large crowd of engaged users who peppered us with great questions.
Phaidracon
- Danny Bernstein will be participating in a roundtable discussion on behalf of Fedora about the role of Open Source in Academia at Phaidracon in association with the University of Vienna. You can read more about it here: https://phaidracon.univie.ac.at/#c768285
SWIB 2021
- We will be giving an Intro to Fedora 6.0 Workshop at Semantic Web in Libraries (SWIB) in November. You can register to attend here: https://swib.org/swib21/registration.html
- We will be giving the workshop on Nov 30 @ 14:00 UTC
CNI
- Fedora community members, Robin Ruggaber (UVA), Amy Blau (Whitman College) and Tim Shearer (UNC Chapel Hill) submitted a pre-recorded presentation for CNI that will be focused on the IMLS Grant pilot partners and lessons learned through the course of the grant. They spoke specifically about the road to Fedora 6.0, their challenges, successes and current state of migration at their individual institutions.
Membership - Your support is valuable!
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!
Get Involved
Fedora is designed, built, used, and supported by the community. Join the conversation on our Fedora Slack channel or sign up for our Fedora community mailing list to stay in the loop. You can find more details here.
