This is the May 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. This funding pays for full time 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!

Annual Report

We are pleased to announce that the 2017 Fedora Annual Report is now available. This report was approved by the Fedora Leadership Group at the end of April. A PDF of the report can be downloaded from the Fedora wiki.

We encourage you to share this report with colleagues and anyone else who might be interested.

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:

1. Define the characteristics and expectations of how clients interact with Fedora implementations
2. Define such interactions such that an implementation’s conformance is testable
3. 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:

1. Resource Management (Linked Data Platform)
2. Resource Versioning (Memento)
3. Resource Authorization (Web Access Controls)
4. Notifications (Activity Streams)
5. 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

Alignment with API Specification

As part of the completion of the Fedora API specification, the current implementation will need to be brought into alignment with the documented specification. To this end, we have completed two code sprints to further the alignment work. The first sprint ran from March 5 to March 16 and the second sprint started April 16th and ran through the 27th. This second sprint featured contributions from the following people and institutions:

• Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
• Bethany Seeger, Amherst College
• Danny Bernstein, DuraSpace
• Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
• Longshou Situ, University of California, San Diego
• Mohamed Abdul Rasheed, University of Maryland
• Peter Eichman, University of Maryland
• Randall Floyd, Indiana University
• Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech

Oxford Common File Layout

The third OCFL call took place on Friday, March 9. Notes, video, and audio are available online. This call featured updates on work in-progress from institutions working on OCFL-related efforts and a review of comments on the OCFL Discussion Paper. We are also collecting use cases in a GitHub repository. The next meeting will be on Friday, May 25th at 11am ET. Please join the pasig-discuss 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

DC Fedora User Group Meeting

Fedora Camp at NASA

IASSIST & CARTO

Open Repositories

Previous Events

DuraSpace Summit

The DuraSpace Member Summit was held April 10-11 prior to the CNI Spring Member Meeting in San Diego. Slides of select presentations are available here. CEO Debra Hanken Kurtz was pleased to report that DuraSpace had its "Best. Year. Ever." in 2017. The facts, figures, and narrative underscore the fact that DuraSpace is a sound investment in the scholarly ecosystem just in time for the launch of our 2018 Membership Campaign.

CNI

The CNI Spring Meeting took place April 12-13 in San Diego, CA. Representatives from CNI member organizations gather twice annually to explore new technologies, content, and applications, to further collaboration, to analyze technology policy issues, and to catalyze the development and deployment of new projects. The program included an update on the Fedora vision, strategy, and roadmap from David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, and Robin Ruggaber, University of Virginia.

ILIDE

The Innovative Library in Digital Era conference, which took place April 15-18 in Jasna, Slovakia, presented visionary and original ideas based on the extensive experience of the participating experts and institutions. This year's program included an update on current Fedora developments and future plans from Neil Jefferies, University of Oxford.

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Danny Bernstein (DuraSpace Tech Lead) attended the Digital Initiatives Symposium on April 23-24 at the University of California, San Diego. He noted the high level of interest expressed by attendees in Kathleen Shearer’s keynote on COAR’s vision of an open scholarly ecosystem as an alternative to the system currently monopolized by the five largest scholarly publishers. Some of the other themes that emerged from the event included data integration (ORCID, Omega), data migration (from CONTENTdm into Islandora), and the value, mechanics, and promise of the Linked Data Platform (LDP).

Southern Miss IR Conference

The Southern Miss IR Conference took place April 26-27 at the University of Southern Mississippi. It provided an opportunity for Institutional Repository (IR) managers to come together and learn about new ideas and strategies that their colleagues are using at their institution to meet the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. The conference included a Fedora demo and a presentation on selecting an open source IR platform by Fedora Product Manager David Wilcox.