2025 Virtual Showcase Program

Details: November 18-20, 2025

Time: ~10:00-2:00pm Eastern each day (see program for more specifics)

Location: Zoom

Cost: FREE

Registration: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/meeting/register/2skrPWlqTaiMph20QJS1Jg

Full project abstracts can be found below.

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Presentation Descriptions

OCFL Overview & Version 2 Update

This presentation will provide a technical overview of the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) specification, the theory behind it, and discuss best practices for optimizing OCFL for long term digital preservation. The presentation will also provide insight into the current work of the OCFL Editorial Board to write and develop a Version 2 spec and discuss how these changes will affect implementations for users.

Fcrepo 6 Performance: What we learned from testing

This study presents a performance evaluation of Fedora Repository 6 (FCRepo 6) in the context of managing Oxford Research Objects. We designed and executed a series of benchmark tests to assess how Fedora 6 handles digital objects of varying sizes distributed according to predefined patterns. To further explore the repository’s robustness, we repeated these tests under different system parameter configurations, simulating both typical and high-load conditions. Our evaluation focuses on throughput, response time, and system stability, providing insights into the scalability and efficiency of Fedora 6 for research data management. We will present the findings, which summarise the ability of FCRepo 6 in handling diverse workloads, offering guidance for institutions considering Fedora 6 for managing complex scholarly objects.

Avalon and IU's long short path to Fedora 6

Avalon Media System, a Samvera-based AV repository, released version 8.0 at the end of 2024 with support for Fedora 6 through ActiveFedora.  Migrating Indiana University's instance of Avalon, Media Collections Online, took a few months using the Fedora migration tooling.  In this talk I'll describe Avalon and IU's long short path to Fedora 6: what informed our decision, the road bumps along the way, and possible future plans.

Hyrax Fedora 6 Working Group Update

The Hyrax Fedora 6 Working Group has been working since early 2024 on understanding, enabling, and improving the use of Fedora 6 as a storage backend for the Samvera Community’s latest version of Hyrax, a software engine used to generate a digital repository application for discovery, access, and management of digital collections. This lightning talk will give an update on the latest results from performance testing comparisons between Hyrax with Fedora 4 and Hyrax with Fedora 6 along with information about additional work and testing that is occurring.

Reconsidering Fedora's Role in Samvera Hyrax: an Emerging Conversation

Having achieved full support for Valkyrie in Hyrax using either PostreSQL or Fedora 6, we're frequently asked by current and potential users which one they should choose, and why.  The typical response to this question has been something to the effect that while PostgreSQL offers raw performance, Fedora offers the features of a preservation repository, but at a slight cost to performance.

While Samvera developers have been working to address some of that performance disparity, it has become more obvious that the question shouldn't be which one to choose but rather how to combine the two to get the best of both worlds.

We would like to share a summary of conversations that have been emerging for an out-of-box configuration that takes advantage of PostgreSQL performance as the immediate application store coupled with Fedora as a downstream preservation repository.

Interoperability Project Open Discussion - facilitated by Lyrasis

Lyrasis, [community]'s Organizational Home, recently committed to a $1 million investment called the Community-Supported Technologies (CST) Growth Fund. In one of a series of projects supported by this fund, they will develop technical specifications for application integrations with all community-supported technologies (CSTs) in the Organizational Home cohort, including Fedora. The goal of the project is to expand the interoperability potential of [ community name ] and the other CSTs. Jess Farrell of Redstart Works has been contracted to identify workflows and develop functional requirements. She will provide an overview of the project and facilitate a conversation about interoperability with the Fedora community.

Disk Space and OCFL

The use of OCFL may cause some trouble in a Fedora repository when many small objects are involved. Some open questions and a possible solution might be discussed with the audience.

Islandora for Data in the Arts and Humanities

The Islandora digital asset management system is used at Masaryk University (Czechia) to store and present a wide range of research data primarily in the Arts and Humanities. To some extent it also serves as a research environment for digital humanities. Fedora is used on the backend of Islandora to support LTP. This presentation will focus on how we use Islandora now and what our plans are in the future.

OCFL, IIIF and Linked Art at Leeds: Fedora's role in a standards-everywhere platform

Our work with Leeds University Libraries has led to a new platform that uses open standards throughout - IIIF for delivery, OCFL for preservation, with Linked Art set to be a semantic layer in the middle. In this architecture, Fedora acts as a gateway to OCFL; we are interested in the end result of OCFL objects on disk (or in our case AWS S3).

In this model the only consumer of Fedora’s Linked Data Platform API is a Storage API abstraction that simplifies the management of Containers, Binaries and Archival Groups, which in turn is consumed by a Preservation API that understands digital preservation workflows and use cases.

On top of this API are a UI as well as additional jobs and processes, migration scripts and other services.
This presentation will show how Fedora + OCFL is the preservation foundation of this platform, saving development time and costs through its role of managing the OCFL and the transactional operations needed to get content in.
There’ll be a brief tour of the Preservation API and hopefully some feedback on the approach we have taken.

Fedora Integration and Media Delivery Enhancements at UT Libraries

The University of Texas at Austin’s Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), built on Django and Fedora 6, has been enhanced with deeper Fedora integration and improved media delivery. Key features include Archival Groups (AGs), Fedora’s internal messaging queue, and Access Control List (ACL)-based media serving.
Archival Groups are used to organize related objects. Collections house assets and associated binaries, and AGs bundle assets with their related files. This approach works effectively but required refactoring of batch ingest and derivative creation workflows to accommodate Fedora’s structural constraints while preserving system efficiency. A notable limitation is that Fedora enforces incremental additions, which differs from the optimized microservice-oriented workflows of our system.
An initial plan to leverage Fedora’s internal message queue for notifying the system when derivative generation microservices completed was explored but discontinued. Limited documentation on extending and configuring Fedora’s embedded broker made it challenging to adapt for our workflows or monitor its internal state.
Currently, media assets are served directly from Fedora, providing a single authoritative source for all digital objects. ACLs enforce granular permission control, aligning access with institutional policies.
We would love to share our experience with the community.

Samvera Hyrax/Hyku and Fedora 6

An overview of the progress the Samvera Hyrax and Hyku projects have made towards Fedora 6 support and how it differs from Fedora 4 in past versions.

The Fedora GUI and Islandora: A Librarian’s Perspective

This brief presentation will focus on the identified misalignments between the Fedora GUI and Islandora while sharing possible ways to improve integration. Nicole Scalessa will raise questions, identify possible ways forward, and share current practices at Vassar to leverage Fedora for preservation management. 

Averting a Data Disaster in Fedora 4: the Importance of Local Preservation Strategies

After 5 years running Fedora 4 in production, and the ingest of over 2 million files, we suddenly lost critical rdf:type assignments on binary resources in Fedora. These rdf entries, primarily based on standard PCDM values, provide file use context which our Samvera Hyrax application relies upon in order to retrieve files. We will describe our observations about this problem, steps we’ve taken to mitigate it, and how our locally developed preservation metadata customizations have enabled us to move forward toward a local fallback solution.

Preserving Community Knowledge and Expanding Educational Access in Pan-African Rural Communities: A Fedora-Based Approach

Access to quality education and the preservation of indigenous knowledge remain pressing challenges across many rural communities in Africa. This presentation explores a unique implementation of Fedora as an open-source digital repository to bridge these gaps. By leveraging Fedora’s robust preservation capabilities, we are digitizing and safeguarding community knowledge—including oral histories, traditional practices, and locally developed educational resources—while making them accessible to current and future generations. Tailored for low-resource and multilingual environments, our Fedora-based approach emphasizes community ownership, cultural relevance, and long-term sustainability. The session will walk through our repository design, workflows for content collection and metadata creation, and strategies for engaging local custodians. We will also share lessons learned in adapting Fedora outside of conventional institutional settings, addressing infrastructure limitations, and fostering grassroots participation. This case demonstrates how Fedora can serve not just as a tool for digital preservation, but as a platform for inclusive education and community empowerment across the Pan-African context.

From archive SIP to AIP in the Fedora repository

The purpose of the presentation is to draw attention to the basic archival professional challenges of the Slovenian Public Archives Service in the segment of acquiring public electronic archival materials and their storage. Special attention will be paid to the data capture process - from the creation of the SIP to the use of the AIP, which is stored in the Fedora repository.

The Migration Saga: Fedora 3.8 to 5/6/7? at National Library of Wales

I plan to tell the long and winding tale of our Fedora migration! I promise to keep the lore to about 5 mins before looking at our current repository and what we're currently doing and planning with our 6 implementation. Will mention infrastructure but will be more about data modelling and integrations due to my technical limitations. Picked 30 mins but happy to tailor to the available slot. 

University of Maryland Update: Retiring Technical Debt and Building Community

This presentation will showcase the progress we have made at the University of Maryland over the past year in improving our Fedora-based digital collections applications. First, we have continued to improve and consolidate our services by migrating content out of legacy systems and retiring old applications. We have also fully migrated into AWS infrastructure. At the same time, we have become more responsive and accountable to our users by creating a formal “Digital Collections Community,” with open sprint review meetings for gathering feedback and developing requirements. These meetings have kept our users better informed, and have made our development work more efficient by providing a regular opportunity to gather user input.

ARK persistent identifiers: affordable long-term citation and access to cultural heritage

The average URL breaks in 100 days, which is a minor disaster for institutions that care about durable access to the scholarly, scientific, and cultural record. It also fails to protect our collective investment in linked data and in AI. For responsible AI in particular, transparency and resilience are at risk when links (URLs) break to billions of inputs, and the already enormous financial and environmental costs of AI are amplified when links break to AI artifacts that then have to be reconstructed.

Citations that fail undermine all our preservation efforts, and it matters little whether linking to human- or AI-generated images, video, documents, datasets, software, maps, training materials, or intangible objects such as vocabulary terms, historical figures.

This presentation introduces ARK (Archival Resource Key) persistent identifiers. As decentralized, non-paywalled PIDs (persistent identifiers, permalinks) for information objects of any kind, ARKs support web addresses that don't break (e.g., that don’t return 404 Page Not Found).

ARKs are similar to DOIs used in traditional publishing in that they both were introduced over 24 years ago, exist in large numbers (12.2 billion ARKs, 280 million DOIs), and support research and scholarship, appearing in the Data Citation Index, Wikipedia, ORCiD.org profiles, etc. In contrast, ARKs are cheaper, more flexible, and less centralized, allowing providers to add any kind of metadata and to create identifiers in unlimited numbers.