As the Project & Community Manager for the Islandora Foundation, I have worked with Fedora since 2012. During that time, I have worked with the Islandora developer and adopter community to manage the challenges of transitioning Islandora from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4 and beyond, while continuing to advance Fedora as a key component of Islandora. 

In the wake of the recent release of the first version of Islandora to be fully compatible with Fedora 5, I will be actively working with our community to support migration, and consulting and responding to their needs and concerns for future versions of Fedora, especially Fedora 6 (and OCFL). In taking a place on the Leadership Group I would look to represent the Islandora community in Fedora’s strategic goals, and to better communicate the Fedora roadmap and its benefits to the Islandora community.

As a long-term adopter of Fedora (since 2005), and advocate for its use in the UK, I have championed the benefits of Fedora as a digital repository platform and supported those exploring its use for a variety of different purposes. I believe in the repository platform being considered as infrastructure rather than application, and seek to refresh how repositories are viewed institutionally to better establish them in this way. I am also a founder member of the Hydra Project (now Samvera Community) in 2008 and recognise the important link between Fedora and the services making use of it to exploit its capabilities as a key element of the future of Fedora. In continuing with a role on the Leadership Group I would look to better understand and support the development of the community as it moves to Fedora 6, highlighting the strengths that make Fedora a valuable investment.

I am the Digital Library Analyst for the University of Wisconsin General Library System, responsible for managing and developing our repository and digital preservation ecosystem.  I have been involved with the Fedora community as a "power user" and advocate since 2005, including stints as a committer for the 3.x versions, a documentation writer, a tester for releases, and an early contributor to the Fedora 4 and OCFL efforts.  Most recently, I have served on the Advisory Committee for the IMLS-funded "Designing a Migration Path" grant project for mapping out strategies to encourage and support the user community move to Fedora 6 and beyond.  My ambition as a leadership member would be to help ensure that the community (actual and potential) has the tools, resources, and most importantly, confidence it needs to deploy and manage Fedora to meet memory institution digital curation and preservation goals now and in the future.

My record demonstrates 17 years of professional experience in an extremely large academic library system (104,000 FTE). I am currently responsible for the strategic vision of repository systems, web applications and discovery systems for 9 libraries on 5 campuses.

I have a strong overall understanding of many repository platforms, metadata, discovery and user experience. We are currently migrating from a homegrown repository platform into Islandora 8 with Fedora.