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Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of DuraSpace members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. We have begun our annual membership campaign with a goal of raising $570,000. This funding pays for full time 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!
Annual Report
We are pleased to announce that the 2017 Fedora Annual Report is now available. This report was approved by the Fedora Leadership Group at the end of April. A PDF of the report can be downloaded from the Fedora wiki.
We encourage you to share this report with colleagues and anyone else who might be interested.
DuraSpace and the Islandora Foundation
DuraSpace is pleased to announce a new formal working relationship with the Islandora Foundation, a Canadian non-profit that fosters the Islandora repository community and codebase. More than two hundred repositories worldwide are built on Islandora, a popular digital asset management platform using Fedora as a back-end repository. The relationship between DuraSpace and the Islandora Foundation will be strengthened by the Foundation’s new bronze-level membership with DuraSpace.
Software development
Standards
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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 have completed two code sprints to further the alignment work. The first sprint ran from March 5 to March 16 and the second sprint started April 16th and ran through the 27th. This second sprint featured contributions from the following people and institutions:
- Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
- Ben Pennell, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Bethany Seeger, Amherst College
- Danny Bernstein, DuraSpace
- Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
- Joe Harrington, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Longshou Situ, University of California, San Diego
- Mohamed Abdul Rasheed, University of Maryland
- Peter Eichman, University of Maryland
- Randall Floyd, Indiana University
- Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech
In the course of the sprint we closed over thirty issues with eleven participants. We made major progress across four broad areas: Memento versioning, SOLID/WebAC, external content handling, and the compatibility test suite. More details below:
Significant work to overhaul the handling of binaries and their descriptions was completed in order to bring the implementation of the Memento API (i.e. versioning) right up to the finish line. In the course of implementing the SOLID/WAC specification (Web Access Control) during the previous sprint we discovered that it would be necessary to decouple access control from Modeshape in order to complete the implementation. During this past sprint the team completed the lion’s share of that work. By making this improvement now, we advanced both short and longer range goals. Namely, aligning the current Fedora implementation with the specification in the short term while simultaneously increasing the flexibility of the codebase by reducing dependencies on the data storage layer (Modeshape). In the interim between the first and second sprints, the spec editors introduced a substantial change to the handling of external content to the Fedora specification. The bulk of that work was completed during the sprint. Finally, the Compatibility Test Suite underwent a series of refactorings and improvements aimed at elevating the quality of codebase to align with other Fedora projects in order to facilitate contribution and increase maintainability.
Oxford Common File Layout
The third OCFL call took place on Friday, March 9. Notes, video, and audio are available online. This call featured updates on work in-progress from institutions working on OCFL-related efforts and a review of comments on the OCFL Discussion Paper. We are also collecting use cases in a GitHub repository. The next meeting will be on Friday, May 25th at 11am ET. Please join the pasig-discuss mailing the ocfl-community mailing list for further updates.
Conferences and events
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DC Fedora User Group Meeting
Fedora Camp at NASA
IASSIST & CARTO
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The next DC Area Fedora User Group Meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 15 at the University of Maryland. The agenda will feature updates on DuraSpace, Fedora, and the recent API alignment sprints, as well as topics from members of the local user community. Please add your name to the event page on the wiki if you plan to attend.
IASSIST & CARTO
The annual IASSIST conference will be held in Montreal, QC on May 29 to June 1. This year’s conference brings together members of IASSIST and ACMLA-ACACC (CARTO), expanding the scope of the conference programme to include data specialists from a variety of fields and workplaces. The program features a workshop and presentation on Fedora by Product Manager David Wilcox. Please register in advance to attend.
Open Repositories
The annual Open Repositories conference will take place June 4-7 in Bozeman, Montana. The conference brings together users and developers of open digital repository platforms from higher education, government, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. The program features a variety of workshops and presentations on Fedora-related topics. Please register in advance to attend.
Islandora Camp EU
June 20 - 22, 2018, Islandora Camp's regular visit to the EU will bring it to Limerick, Ireland, at the beautiful (and newly updated) library of the University of Limerick. Please register in advance to attend.
Islandora Camp HRM
Islandora Camp is coming to Atlantic Canada! July 18 - 20, 2018, we will be gathering in historic Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the campus of Mount Saint Vincent University. Come for the islandora, stay for the food, history, and gorgeous waterfront. Please register in advance to attend.
Previous Events
DuraSpace Summit
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