Page History

Leads on New Fedora Community Members

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.

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/^{Image Removed}), 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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