This is the July 2016 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.

Call for Action

Fedora is designed, built, used, and supported by the community. An easy and important way that you can contribute to the effort is by helping resolve outstanding bugs. If you have an interest in gaining a better understanding of the Fedora code base, or a specific interest in any of these bugs [1], please add a comment to a ticket and we can work together to move your interest forward.

Membership

Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of DuraSpace members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. The 2015 membership campaign concluded with $563,750 in funding and 76 members. The 2016 membership campaign kicked off in May, and so far the Fedora project has raised $419,750 from 53 members. The annual goal this year is $580,000, so we are over 70% of the way there. The Fedora Product Manager will continue to coordinate with members of the Fedora Leadership Group to expand the pool of DuraSpace members supporting the Fedora project and build a sustainable funding base for the future. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us!

New Members

We would like to welcome two new DuraSpace members in support of Fedora: RMIT and Vassar College. Both institutions have joined at the Bronze level. We appreciate their commitment to the long term sustainability of DuraSpace and Fedora.

Upgrades

Several institutions have increased their annual contributions to Fedora this year, and we would like to thank them for their tremendous support:

Arizona State University (Silver to Gold)
Art Institute of Chicago (Bronze to Silver)
Johns Hopkins University (Silver to Gold)
Ohio State University (Gold to Platinum)

Software development

Standards

Fedora API Specification

The Fedora community is working to establish a clearly defined specification for the core Fedora services [2]. This specification will detail the exact services and interactions required for a server implementation to be verified as "doing Fedora".

You are invited to comment on and contribute to the draft specifications [8].

Community-driven Activity

Import/Export Tooling

One of the design goals of Fedora is to simplify the process of both getting your resources into and out of Fedora in a standardized way. This enables the reuse of Fedora resources in other contexts, such as exporting to a separate preservation system, as well as provides a pathway for migrating across Fedora installations, such as migrating from a LevelDB backend to PostgreSQL. Half of the problem is solved with the existing GET/POST interactions for RDF and non-RDF resources provided by the Linked Data Platform API. The other half should be addressed by tooling external to Fedora. In addition to the basic import/export of simple RDF and non-RDF resources, there is also significant community interest in supporting import/export of BagIt bags.

In an effort to design and implement both the basic and BagIt approaches, we would like to begin gathering a show of interest from the community towards the participation in an initial sprint targeted for later this summer. Please respond to the mailing list thread if you are interested and available to participate in this effort.

Fedora/Hydra WebAC Alignment

Web Access Control, a W3C standard for interoperable, RDF-based authorization, has been implemented in both Fedora 4 and Hydra. However, until recently the two implementations differed slightly, preventing them from being compatible with one another. The differences have now been resolved, which will allow access controls to be enforced at both the Hydra and Fedora layers. The Islandora CLAW project also intends to implement WebAC as an authorization standard, opening the door to further interoperability between Fedora-based systems.

API Extension Architecture

The API-X group has published a design document that will be ratified shortly. A high-level overview document has also been drafted, which will be published after further review. The group also met at Open Repositories to discuss how best to align the API-X work with ongoing Islandora CLAW development.

If you are interested in the API Extension Architecture, please join the discussion on the fedora-community mailing list [12] and attend the next meeting.

Performance and Scalability

The Performance and Scalability group has begun testing with ModeShape 5 and noted an ingest performance increase of about 15%. Tests with alternative databases (MySQL and PostgreSQL) have also been performed.

If you are interested in Performance and Scalability, please join the discussion on the fedora-community mailing list [14] and attend the next meeting [15] on June 24.

Conferences and events

Upcoming Events

Islandora Camp BC

Islandora Camp [18] is returning to Vancouver for the second iCampBC, July 18 - 20. All West Coast Islandorians and anyone else who would like to see beautiful British Columbia while learning about Islandora are welcome to attend.

South Central States Fedora Users Group Meeting

The first annual meeting of the South Central States Fedora Users Group will take place July 18-19 in Norman, OK. The meeting will include conversations regarding current implementations, work underway at peer institutions, discussion for users considering the tool, and Fedora workshops led by Fedora experts and developers. Please register in advance if you plan to attend.

Archivematica Camp

The first ever Archivematica Camp will be hosted by the University of Michigan School of Information in Ann Arbor, Michigan, August 24 – 26, 2016. Inspired by similar events like Hydra Camp, Islandora Camp and Fedora Camp, this event is intended to provide a space for anyone interested in or currently using Archivematica, to come together, learn about the platform and share their experiences.

Previous Events

Open Repositories

References

[1]  https://jira.duraspace.org/issues/?filter=13122
[2]

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2016-07 Fedora Newsletter