Leads on New Fedora Community Members, and DuraCloud Possibilities
Last Summary
- Guy Hussussian, R&D Director at VMWare, (ghussussian@vmware.com) I don't know where they are with it but Guy was leading an effort to bring Fedora in to VMWare to run their catalog of services. I spent a morning with the tech staff answering questions and there was definitely serious interest. I don't know how it has played out.
- Michael Levy, Digital Collections Director, US National Holocaust Museum (mlevy@ushmm.org) Michael is trying to get the Holocaust museum to get serious about digital collections. I made two visits, first a general Q&A attended by a wide variety of staff, then a focused session with the CIO and high-level techies. Good potential for a high-visibility use of Fedora in the museum world. They would most likely be a candidate for a service provider to do the work and have already been talking to Mark Leggott and maybe Matt Zumwalt.
- Jon Dunn, Indiana University (jwd@indiana.edu) Jon is the lead on a project to develop the 4th phase of the Variations project at IU which will add video to what is already the premier music teaching system available in higher ed. At a minimum, it appears that they will make it possible to integrate Variations with Fedora and DSpace. There is a chance that they could see Fedora as a key technology within the system itself. I served as an advisor in a meeting at IU in October for the planning grant effort to get a larger group together to go after grants to do the work. The main participants are IU and Northwestern U, but also possibly included are Ohio State, NYU, University of York (the UK one), Berkeley and Stanford.
- Marc Custer, Office of Publications, European Union (Marc.KUSTER@publications.europa.eu) I met Marc at a meeting where we were working on developing a whitepaper that talks about integrating repositories into virtual research environments. He is with the directorate of the EU that publishes all of the EU legal documents in all languages of the membership (currently 23 languages). They are beginning to use Fedora to do it. This will be a very interesting FRBR-oriented system. I spent 2 hours on the phone with the development team and, I think, succeeded in getting them on a better track to get started.
- Tobias Blanke (tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk) and Mark Hedges (mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk) , Centre for e-Research, Kings College London Tobias and Mark sponsored a meeting to discuss the integration of repositories with virtual research environments. We did the brainstorming at that meeting that is supposed to lead to a white paper. Participants included Alex Wade from Microsoft Research, Fabio Simeoni from Strathclyde U. who does the n-4-Cube VRE system.
- Dan Rehak (daniel.rehak.ctr@adlnet.gov) and Damon Regan (damon.regan.ctr@adlnet.gov), Advanced Distance Learning The ADL is a Dept. of Defense group that is a big developer of learning object based systems. They have strong relationships with the NSDL folks. I did a half-day Q&A with them about Fedora and DuraCloud. Dan is some kind of technical advisor and Damon is their lead developer person. In the two activities I have done with them there has been participation by other Defense folks, as well as NSF and Dept. of Education folks. They are a good connection into the ".GOV" effort initiated out of the White House to bring together all of the government information systems. They have a strong interest in Fedora, and both attended OR this year. Dan was the one who initiated the bid to sponsor OR in Washington, DC next year.
February, 2010
- Steve Green, British Library (Stephen.Green@bl.uk) Steve was interested in Fedora and I went to the BL when I was last in London to hold a teleconference Q&A with his staff in Boston Spa, he and I were in London. The two guys we talked to were definitely industry/database-oriented guys. I did manage to dispel some misconceptions but didn't manage to get them over the finish line. They continue to engage with the Fedora community in the UK, however, and might actually get there.
- Sheila Anderson, e-Research Centre, Kings College London (sheila.anderson@kcl.ac.uk) Sheila is definitely a player in the UK. She ran the Arts and Humanities Data Service before it got shut down, now is the director of the e-Research Centre at Kings. She is very knowledgeable about the interface of repositories and faculty research, especially but not limited to the humanities. She doesn't answer email almost ever...
- John Howard, University College Dublin (john.b.howard@ucd.ie) John is a head librarian who is also a programmer! He was the AUL for tech at Arizona State and has been a big Fedora supporter for many years. He is planning to take UCD Library into a major role as coordinating the digital stuff for the entire U. He has Vice-president status there and the President's ear. They have been Fedora users for a long time, but the library had never been central. There were a bunch of archives with different kinds of collections that were brought together to create a digital library in Fedora. When John came to UCD in 2009 he hired Sheila Anderson and I to do a review of their digital library program, so that he could ramp things up with better knowledge and more buy-in. Definitely someone to use when you need a supportive head librarian. I think that his ability to give money to things like sponsorship was limited this year, but may not be next.
- Steven Keegan, Trinity College Dublin (keeganst@tcd.ie) Steven was a new hire that is building a digital archive at Trinity for early books manuscripts and historical documents. I spent some time with him answering questions about Fedora which I believe he adopted.
- Greg Colati, U. of Denver Library (greg.colati@du.edu) is an achivist at the library who oversees their digital stuff. He has a better tech staff than the Alliance does and often helps them with projects and he chairs their committee that is reviewing their repository strategy. I went out and spent a day reviewing with that committee. Greg is a big Fedora supporter. If it is not already know or obvious, he is married to Jessica (below) and is very influential with the Alliance.
- Jessica Colati, Colorado Alliance (Jessica@coalliance.org) Jessica directs the repository stuff at the Alliance. She has a minimal tech staff who, to put it bluntly, are not that sharp. She is very knowledgeable and effective but she is in a pretty difficult position. Note that she is often very slow to respond.
January, 2010
- Jim Harrison, University of Virginia (james.harrison@virginia.edu) Jim is faculty in the medical school in the clinical information program. I have been working with him for about 3 years now, along with Martha Sites, Tim Sigmon and James Hilton, to help him use Fedora. He has put in a large NIH grant, "Life Sciences Grid" which is based on using Fedora. Note that he is doing this jointly with Andrew Grimshaw who is in computer sciences at UVA. Andrew has developed a new grid system (Genesis II) that will be part of it. I have encouraged them to look at an Akubra plugin for it. Note that I am listed as a consultant to the grant, so if they get it, I will be doing that on the side.
- Jeff Gima, American International Consortium of Academic Libraries (jgima@aup.fr) Jeff is the director of this group and is organizing the conference in Budapest that Susan Perry (below) hooked me up with. I have had some conversations with him about our products and their program. They are pretty small scale in most of their places but some interesting possiblilties exist for repository work and cloud services down the road. I will be doing a workshop about helping people to think about repositories conceptually, and talk a bit about Fedora, plus giving a keynote that further develops my "Scholarly Communication is a Web in the Clouds" theme.
- Michael Witt, Purdue University (Michael Witt is part of the Data Curation solution community, such as it is. He also is working with some grad students to do yet another comparison of DSpace, Eprints and Fedora. I have given him pretty extensive comments and connected him up with Val.
- Dale Peters Dale has left DRIVER and is now the Head of Academic Computing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. That is the place where she used to be and where the DISA project is set. I visited there last year. She wrote to me that she is very interested in continuing to promote Fedora and our other projects. If we need a DuraSpace point person in South Aftrica, she is definitely it.
December, 2009
- Bryan Beacher, ICPSR Bryan talked to me about participating in DuraCloud, which he has since applied to do. ICPSR is using Fedora. They are also looking for a new director, Myron Guttman left to go to NSF. Myron is a big fan of Fedora so we should keep him in mind.
- David Greenbaum, Berkeley and Bamboo Project David talked to me at CNI about Fedora in multiple contexts, including Bamboo. His group at Berkeley also supports various other large projects, including that of Eric Kansa, see below. I will be visiting them to continue both discussions in March in association with the west coast users meeting at Stanford.
- Susan Perry, Mellon Susan is a program officer for Mellon with her own area that seems to have to do with small liberal arts colleges. I met her through Joan Lippencott and she is an old bud of Karin's apparently. We talked at CNI about this conference that she is putting on in Budapest this summer for the American International Consortium of Academic Libraries, a group of libraries at 22 small American univerisities in Europe, Africa and Asia, with a strong middle eastern group apparently. I am going to particiapte in a workshop and give a conference talk about something to do with durability of scholarly projects in the humanities; they will pay.
- Lodewijk Bogaards, DANS Lodewijk is a bit of a loose canon but he does get things done and he now understands the way that the committers work. He has the potential to contribute in a big way. They have developed their own app for Fedora that is just about ready to come out. They also have some very interesting projects going on with Fedora. He hosted an afternoon with the DANS folks. There is strong interest in DuraCloud, but some distrust in the cloud more generally.
- Jane Chen, private consultant I met her at the DISH conference in Rotterdam. She is a consultant in the museum and cultural heritage sector and she is involved with Howard Goldstein (he's active in Small Archives, see below) in setting up a non-profit operation that is interested in developing software for museums and archives. She is very sharp and is working with the folks at the Balboa Park museums on long-term strategy. Josh Greenberg introduced her to me.
- Andrew Treloar Andrew presented at the Oxford meeting on his current projects. He also said, quite clearly, that in his current role he has big bucks to give out (12 million Australian was the number that sticks) and he thought that Australia had taken quite liberally from the open-source world and it was time to give back. The only catch is he can only spend the money on Australians. He made it clear that he wanted to support what was going on at FIZ Karlsruhe and Fedora. I have approached him (January, 2010) about contributing to the core development, but have not heard back as he is on vacation for most of the month.
- Martin Dow When I was at the Oxford meeting I had a good talk with Martin. He has a potential client in a large business in the UK and wanted to get a feel for where DuraSpace was going so that he could best convince that client that the Fedora software has a stable long-term home. I think we were really more rehearsing him on things he already knew, but it was a good conversation. He was very enthusiastic about where we have been going and he particularly made a point of praising the Akubra work as spot on what was needed. I have passed that on to Chris.
November, 2009
- Rolf Brugger, SWITCH Rolf runs the learning objects repository at SWITCH which is a national higher-ed consortium for Switzerland. They are long-time Fedora users who participate on mailing lists, etc. He pulled together the large group of Fedora users that I first started discussing with Tobias Wildi (see March 2009, Docuteam) last spring. I discussed starting up a users group for Switzerland with him and there was interest. It is relatively easy for everyone to get together for a one-day meeting and get home in the evening. Don't know if there is any direct possiblities for DuraCloud here, but he is very well connected nationwide, so could help point to possibilities.
- Eric Kansa, School of Information at Berkeley Eric is the director of a program that collects lots of data from small archaeological projects for long-term sustaining; very oriented to getting the stuff out in a sustainable way, not a dark archive. He collects lots of FileMaker, Access, etc. databases and converts them to a data model that is very Fedora-ready. He is potentially a very good possibility for DuraCloud too. I think he has strong ties to Cliff Lynch.
- Ortwin Dally, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Ortwin is with the DAI in Berlin. The are the national organization that funds the various schools that Germany runs around the world. (The American School is the only one not funded by the government of the 10 or so in Athens.) This was the first meeting of the German and American School to look into cooperating and collaborating. The DAI is very interested in Fedora. I am trying to work out a visit to them in Berlin in the spring. Can't get them to pay travel but they will pick up local expenses. I don't think that there is much possibility for the DuraCloud service here but they could an interesting use case for the software in-house.
- Jack Davis, American School for Classical Studies at Athens Jack is the Director of the School in Athens. He is a very computer savvy archaeologist. The American School has ambitious plans for digital libraries, but very limited IT resources. The organization is a private consortium of American universities, with a very large managing board made up of faculty from the universities. The are VERY shy of adding any positions for IT. The School is the repository for several major and many minor digs in Greece (with increasing large collections of born-digital), they have two libraries with significant rare materials, and a large archive that incudes both the school and what is seen to be the Greek national archive for papers of famous people. They are a good possibility for Fedora in the longer run. This meeting was a joint meeting with the German School in Athens to begin to look into possible joint solutions to durable information systems. It seems to me that the School is a potential DuraCloud customer, possibly sooner if it were just for replication of stuff in Greece at locations in North America. It will require some education/outreach to board members who are here in the States.
October, 2009
- Lee Namba, ATOS Origin I met Lee when I was consulting with ATOS for the BNF project.He has now moved to running a programming group that works with Roger's area. We are planning a talk with him and whoever he brings next week to go over the OSGi stuff (Eddie and Chris will do a briefing0 but also to talk about what they can do on the next two releases to keep Eddie and Chris free to continue concentrating on OSGi. Chris and I agree that we will position this like we would with anyone else proving themselves to be committers: doing good work to establish the trust, then bring someone in from ATOS as a committer.
- Derek Keats, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg I met Derek at Pasig. He recently moved from a U. in Capetown to Joburg. His presentation was about the "design of a private cloud in relation to creating synergy among various IT initiatives in order to deliver a cutting-edge archiving infrastructure based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)." He is very interested in small archives generally. He talked to me about getting some Fedora training going in South Africa, which I have also been talking about with Pat Liebetrau at the DISA project in Durban. He says that he can get the money to put it together and bring people over. I am trying to get them together on it.
- Rachel Frick, IMLS Rachel is a senior program officer at IMLS who was at the PASIG. I met her years ago when she was with the digital library program at the University of Richmond. I went down there to give a talk. She says that IMLS is very interested in the whole subject of small archives and she is interested in our solution community effort. I have offered to come to DC and do a session on Fedora for the IMLS program officers like the one I did for NEH last year.
- Karim Boughida, George Washington University Karim is in the library at GW heading up their digital initiatives effort. He used to be at the Getty Research Institute. When he heard that I was till in Charlottesville, he said that he would like me to come talk to them about Fedora, etc. I told him that I would be happy to if he invited his friends. There is a consortium of private universities in the DC area that we haven't had much contact with that could be included, as well as other government and business types.
September, 2009
- Paolo Mangiafico, Duke University I gave a general talk about Fedora, DuraSpace and DuraCloud to the "Triangle Research Libraries Network" which includes UNC, NC State, Duke and North Carolina Central. David Kennedy from Duke set it up but this guy is his boss. They have been using Fedora at Duke's main library for a little while now. David was hired from Maryland where he was involved in significant projects. It seems like there is the chance to both set up a TRLN users group and also to possiblity get some collaborative development going. Paolo seems particularly interested in the community development aspects.
August, 2009
- Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society This guy skyped me from his summer home in Novosibirsk, Russia yesterday. Apparently he is the founder of the Open Library Society, Inc. a private non-profit group that does digital library stuff. He is preparing a course on digital libraries that he wants to teach at Long Island U. in the fall and wanted to include Fedora. I sent him two of my slide sets. I'm not sure whether he is a wacko or not, but he agreed to make his materials available.
- DC Area Users Group This was a joint meeting of the DC Code4Lib and the new Fedora users group. A very good meeting for which Fedora was the theme. Andrew and I did a Fedora update, and a DuraSpace DuraCloud presention. Andrew also showed the new test repository instance that he has running in the cloud. We don't have any objects in it yet, but there was real interest in having access to it. Several people there were saying that they would really find it useful to be able to use such an instance of Fedora with some persistent storage. The example that really resonated was to get a test intance of the repository that they would like to have up so that they could work on it for a while and do presentations of a design, etc. There was clearly an interest in paying for such a service. There is also strong interest in DuraCloud. Apparently, this new CTO in the Obama adminstration is pushing the Cloud in a big way. People there were from NLM, NOAA, Ag. Library, Goddard and the CIA. A guy from the CIO of NOAA's office was there, named Richard Schneider, and he was very interested in all of this. Andrew and I had lunch with him.
- Loren Sherbak, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian I didi a presentation for serveral departments at the Smithsonian, hosted by the archives. I did my content modeling presentation as followup to two others that I have done over the last two years. Loren was very interested in the possiblitiy of running a Fedora repository in DuraCloud. They have budget for such things but minimal IT support.
- George Van Dyke, Smithsonian George and his new tech lead were both there. I'm not sure where George is attached in the SI exactly, but he is working on a big data curation project. He is very uncomfortable with all of the Cloud talk. They are looking for the right solution for the data archive and he has been sniffing around Fedora for a while. The time of my content modeling presentation was good for the tech lead. He has been playing around with Fedora for a little while now but the light bulb really hadn't gone on about what he could really do with it. His reaction to my presentation made it clear that the light bulb is now burning brightly.
July, 2009
- Arizona State University Library ASU has been one of our longest running users but I really didn't know how they were using Fedora so this was interesting. They don't do any digitizing of their own collections, they work with faculty projects. They have worked on a variety of things, science and humanities, including a big GIS centered project. I don't know what will happen when John leaves. One strong interest that we talked about is in creating an XML editing service that create and manage XML datastreams for a variety of metadata standards. Also, one of their programmers made the point that DSpace's developer community was largely built by developers who were interested in the top of the stack, the user interface related stuff, which Fedora doesn't have. I think that maybe we could use the SWAT team idea to organize developers for Fedora around higher level apps and utilities (like the XML thing) that would feed more developers into the community. Some of them might become interested in on the core.
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- David Bearman and Jennifer Trant I saw them at the Museums and the Web conference which their company, Archives and Museum Informatics (http://www.archimuse.com/
), puts on. These guys are very important in the museum world and would be very useful for DuraSpace to make new contacts. The museum space seems ripe for cloud services.
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