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API Extension Architecture 

The first API-X milestone is now complete: a concrete implementation milestone release of the API Extension Architecture is now publically available. A Docker-based demonstration of API-X , accompanied by a set of evaluation tasks comprising a demo that showcases its current capabilities and serves as a basis for soliciting feedback from the community. The demo includes services provided by Amherst College, and will demonstrate the capability of API-X to incorporate these services into the repository layer. You are invited to deploy the demo, run through the evaluation tasks, and provide feedbackwith accompanying step-by-step evaluation guide has been prepared for those who are interested in concretely exploring API-X and providing valuable feedback. Please take a look at it, give it a try, and provide feedback. An introductory video providing an overview of API-X can also be found on YouTube. This milestone and demo represents the culmination of a year of design and development effort from a broad swath of the Fedora community, and has been helped along by an IMLS National Digital Platform grant.

The API-X team holds regular bi-weekly meetings. The next meeting will take place on Thursday, January 19 at 1pm Eastern time.

Performance and Scalability

The Performance and Scalability group met on November 21 to discuss updating the graphs and summaries of completed tests . The group also plans to refine JMeter tests to be short running rather than running until Fedora fails. This will allow the tests to be run in quick succession while varying characteristics along the way (I/O, memory, etc.) in order to establish characteristics between hardware and application performance.

If you are interested in Performance and Scalability, please join the discussion on the fedora-community mailing list  and attend the next meeting on January 16.

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 .

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The 12th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC)  will be held in Edinburgh from February 20-23, 2017 bringing together digital curation professionals and educators with data producers and consumers to consider digital curation in a multi-disciplinary context. David Wilcox, Fedora product manager for DuraSpace, will offer a full-day Fedora workshop, “Curating Digital Content with Fedora,” on Thursday, February 23. The main conference runs from February 21-22. Workshop registration details may be found on the conference website . There is a  £90 charge for the workshop paid to conference organizers.

ESIP

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Previous Events

CNI

The 2016 CNI Fall Membership Meeting took place December 12-13 in Washington, DC. 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. The meeting featured several presentations from Fedora community members, including panel discussions on digital preservation and integration with OSF:

Representatives from the Center for Open Science, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Notre Dame, and DuraSpace participated in a well-attended panel discussion on integrating Fedora with the Open Science Framework. By integrating preservation into research workflows, archiving and preservation would move from being distinct activities following the active research phase to more continuous activities that are part of researchers' existing workflows throughout the research lifecycle. Furthermore, this work will enable the true mission of preservation by facilitating reuse and retrieval of archived data and files into subsequent research projects.

Fedora Leadership Group members from Northwestern University, Stanford University, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Virginia participated in a vigorous panel discussion on the role of Fedora in a digital preservation solution. This informal discussion featured active audience participation around the complexities of digital preservation; the vocabulary is not well-defined, and many people use the same terms with different meanings. A long-term digital preservation strategy incorporates many components, including repositories with digital preservation features, geographically and functionally diverse storage systems, organisational, financial, and legal succession plans, and compliance with best-practice recommendations. Ultimately, no single piece of software offers a complete digital preservation solution (nor can it) but it is clear that Fedora can play a key role in such a solution.