This is the June 2018 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, 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. We have begun our annual membership campaign with a goal of raising $570,000, and so far we have raised $291,667 which is just over half of our goal! This funding pays for staff to work on the project and provide technical leadership, direct strategic planning, organize community outreach, and coordinate timely software releases. Membership also provides opportunities to participate in project governance and influence the direction of the software. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us today!
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The Candidate Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still available for public review.
As described in the charter, this specification is designed to:
- Define the characteristics and expectations of how clients interact with Fedora implementations
- Define such interactions such that an implementation’s conformance is testable
- Enable interoperability by striving to minimize the need for modifications to client applications in order to work with different implementations of the Fedora API specification
The core HTTP and notification services defined in this specification are listed below, along with the associated standards from which they are derived:
- Resource Management (Linked Data Platform)
- Resource Versioning (Memento)
- Resource Authorization (Web Access Controls)
- Notifications (Activity Streams)
- Extended Binary Resource Operations
- Fixity (HTTP headers)
The public comment period for the Candidate Recommendation will remain open until the Spring, after which we are targeting the release of the full Recommendation. Minimum requirements for transitioning to releasing the Recommendation include:
- Specification compliance test suite
- Two or more implementations of the specification
- No unresolved, outstanding critical issues, as defined by the specification editors
Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
Community-driven Activity
Oxford Common File Layout
The fourth OCFL call took place on Friday, May 25. Notes are available online. This call focused on setting a timeline for an initial 0.9 release of the specification in the Fall and transitioning the community calls to addressing tricky parts of the specification. The specification repository is now accessible at ocfl.io. We are also collecting use cases in a GitHub repository. The next meeting will be on Friday, June 22nd at 11am ET. Please join the ocfl-community mailing list for further updates.
Conferences and events
In an attempt to simplify the task of keeping up with Fedora-related meetings and events, a Fedora calendar is available to the community as HTML and iCal .
If you have not already joined the fedora-project Slack workspace please start by visiting the self-registration form. Come join the conversation!
Upcoming Events
Open Repositories
The annual Open Repositories conference will take place June 4-7 in Bozeman, Montana. The conference brings together users and developers of open digital repository platforms from higher education, government, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. The program features a variety of workshops and presentations on Fedora-related topics. Please register in advance to attend.
Islandora Camp EU
June 20 - 22, 2018, Islandora Camp's regular visit to the EU will bring it to Limerick, Ireland, at the beautiful (and newly updated) library of the University of Limerick. Please register in advance to attend.
Islandora Camp HRM
Islandora Camp is coming to Atlantic Canada! July 18 - 20, 2018, we will be gathering in historic Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the campus of Mount Saint Vincent University. Come for the islandora, stay for the food, history, and gorgeous waterfront. Please register in advance to attend.
Previous Events
DC Fedora User Group Meeting
The most recent DC Area Fedora User Group Meeting took place on Tuesday, May 15 at the University of Maryland. The agenda featured updates on DuraSpace, Fedora, and the recent API alignment sprints, as well as topics from members of the local user community such as a comparison of IIIF viewers, fixity checking at UMD, linked data implementations at NASA Goddard, and a Python-Based Batchload Client for the Fedora API. Presentation slides are available on the wiki. Please join the DC Area Fedora User Group mailing list for updates on future meetings.
Fedora Camp NASA
Fedora Camp was held at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on May 15-18. The camp curriculum started with the basics and moved into more advanced topics throughout the week. Thanks to the team at NASA Goddard for hosting the camp, and to Esme Cowles from Princeton University and Josh Westgard from the University of Maryland for joining the team of instructors for the camp.
IASSIST & CARTO
The annual IASSIST conference will be held in Montreal, QC on May 29 to June 1. This year’s conference brings together members of IASSIST and ACMLA-ACACC (CARTO), expanding the scope of the conference programme to include data specialists from a variety of fields and workplaces. The program features a workshop and presentation on Fedora by Product Manager David Wilcox. Please register in advance to attend.
