This is the August 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 2016 membership campaign has so far raised $459,750 from 58 members. The annual goal this year is $580,000, so we are almost 80% of the way there. We 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 [2]!

New Members

We would like to thank the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for supporting Fedora at the Gold level this year. MIT has been a DuraSpace member for some time but this is the first year they have allocated funding to the Fedora project. We appreciate their commitment to the long term sustainability of DuraSpace and Fedora.

For more information on membership and benefits please see the DuraSpace website [].

Governance

Fedora is governed by representative, community-based groups of members who have made the greatest commitments to the project. More information on project governance can be found on the website.

Steering Group Election

We recently completed the annual Fedora Steering Group election, where three Leadership Group members were nominated and elected to join the Steering Group for a three year term.

Software development

Standards

Fedora API Specification

The Fedora community is working to establish a clearly defined specification for the core Fedora services []. 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 [].

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.

The first meeting was held to come to a shared understanding of what we would like to achieve with this effort and review the use cases. The next call, which will take place on July 29, will be used to finish reviewing the use cases, review the requirements, and make a plan for the code sprints. Please attend the call and contribute to the planning page [] if you are interested and available to participate in this effort.

API Extension Architecture

The API-X group has completed the review process for the Design Overview and Extension Definition and Binding documents. Two additional documents, Service Discovery and Binding and Execution and Evoking Services are now available for review. Additionally, a separation document on URIs in API-X has been created to address an issue that was raised during the review of the Design Overview document.

If you are interested in the API Extension Architecture, please join the discussion on the fedora-community mailing list [] and attend the next meeting [] on August 4.

Performance and Scalability

The Performance and Scalability group met to report on a number of test results from Virginia Tech, Princeton, and York University.

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

Conferences and events

Upcoming Events

Code4Lib New York State

The Code4Lib New York State (NYS) regional meeting & unconference will take place on August 4-5, 2016. This meeting will be held at Mann Library, Cornell University. The 2 days will be a mix of scheduled/planned and impropmtu sessions, workshops, lightning talks, and break out sessions. A Fedora 4 workshop, led by Esmé Cowles, Andrew Woods, will take place on Thursday, August 4.

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. The last day of the camp will be dedicated to hacking on integration(s) with Hydra/Fedora/Islandora and Archivematica.

Previous Events

Islandora Camp BC

Islandora Camp [] returned to Vancouver for the second iCampBC, July 18 - 20.

South Central States Fedora Users Group Meeting

The first annual meeting [23] of the South Central States Fedora Users Group took place July 18-19 in Norman, OK. The meeting included conversations regarding current implementations, work underway at peer institutions, discussion for users considering the tool, and a Fedora workshop led by Andrew Woods.

References

[1]  https://jira.duraspace.org/issues/?filter=13122
[2]  http://www.duraspace.org/become_a_member
[3]

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2016-08 Fedora Newsletter