Day 1 - Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Fedora Community Update
Presenter: Arran Griffith, Program Manager
This presentation will provide an update on the current initiatives of the Fedora Program. We will share insights about community work, engagement efforts and strategic plans for continuing to expand the global Fedora community.
Fedora Technical Update
Presenter: Dan Field, Fedora Developer
This presentation will provide an overview of the current technical developments being done within the Fedora technical groups. Dan will discuss the development roadmap and future plans for feature development for Fedora.
Introduction to the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) & Version 2.0
Presenter: Neil Jefferies, OCFL Editorial Board
In this presentation, Neil will provide a technical overview of the 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.
Introduction to Fedora Workshop (2 hrs)
Facilitator(s): Dan Field, Fedora Developer & Arran Griffith, Program Manager
This workshop will provide an introductory look at the most current version of Fedora – Fedora 6.x.Instructors will dive into important features that helped return Fedora to its digital preservation roots. We will showcase and demonstrate the available migration tooling and documentation as we work through managing resources in Fedora. Lastly we will demonstrate a simplified migration and introduce attendees on ways to integrate Fedora with your ecosystem via the Camel Toolbox.
The workshop will include several hands-on portions that will allow attendees to exercise Fedora features, while learning about their purpose and function. These features are accessible via a built-in web interface, so no command line experience is required.
Lyrasis & The Organizational Home
Presenter: Michele Menneilli, Global Outreach Strategist, Lyrasis
This brief presentation will explore Lyrasis, the organization, and discuss how Lyrasis supports open source communities, like Fedora, through the Organizational Home model. Michele will discuss how Lyrasis is partnering with global communities to help support and foster ecosystems dedicated to free and open access.
PHAIDRA Community Update
Presenter: Raman Ganguly
This presentation will introduce the PHAIDRA community and provide an overview of current activities, outreach initiatives and more.
Day 2 - Thursday, September 11, 2025
OCFL, IIIF and Linked Art at Leeds: Fedora's role in a standards-everywhere platform
Presenter: Tom Crane
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.
OCFL Optimization at the Berlin State Library
Presenter: Dr. Oliver Schöner
This presentation will explore how the Berlin State Library is using OCFL to support the long term digital preservation of their digital content, and they ways they plan to work with it in future iterations of their repository.
Fedora 6 and OCFL, a rock-solid duo for digital preservation
Presenter: Jaime Penagos Carrascal
Fedora 6 and OCFL have shown to be effective as a simple yet flexible solution to the basic and more complex scenarios of digital preservation. The technical and conceptual requirements of a research data project can be challenging to model, and with this presentation we want to share our experience on how Fedora (starting from version 5, but focused on version 6 since its release) and OCFL have been crucial to make some of our workflows easier to build and gave us the tools to control how our data is stored and modelled. From our early requirements to current perspectives, along the features we started using back then and what are we using nowadays (and planning to use in the near future).
PHAIDRA Technical Update
Presenter: Rasta Hudak
This presentation will discuss the latest achievements in developing the PHAIDRA repository (layout and accessibility, kubernetes, support for 3D objects and more), as well discuss the current progress of migration to the newest platform (part of which is migration from Fedora 3.x to Fedora 6.x). We will also share the experiences we gathered along, including lessons learned.
Fedora Integrations Workshop (2 hrs)
Facilitator: Dan Field, Fedora Developer
This workshop will feature introduction to some of the community-developed tools for integrating Fedora with a full repository solution. We will explore use cases for the Camel Toolbox and some of the best practices for implementation.
Fedora User Group Session
Facilitator(s): Arran Griffith & Michele Mennielli
This open discussion will be focused on understanding the needs of developing a formalized User Group model for Fedora users outside of North America. As the Fedora global community continues to expand, the Program Team would like to ensure there is appropriate support, locally, for users in different geographic areas. This discussion will inform what needs exist, and how best to establish User Groups to suit those with interest. Drawing on the experiences of other open source communities that Lyrasis engages with, we will work toward developing an actionable plan for the Fedora community. All participants are welcome and encouraged to participate in this open discussion.
Day 3 - Friday, September 12, 2025
Preserving Community Knowledge and Expanding Educational Access in Pan-African Rural Communities: A Fedora-Based Approach
Presenter: Yakub Damola
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.
fcrepo 6 Performance: What We Learned From Testing
Presenter: Anusha Ranganathan
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.
Migrations Workshop (1 hr)
Facilitator: Dan Field, Fedora Developer
This workshop will be focused on teaching and training around the community-developed tools for migrations to Fedora 6.x. Facilitators will explore how the tooling works, how to execute basic migration functions, validate migrated content and read OCFL file structures. If time allows, we will discuss and answer questions regarding specific migration needs and use cases, so participants can come prepared with examples or data to work with. This is not required, but if you have specific needs, please consider bringing them to share.
Interoperability Discussion
Facilitator: Arran Griffith
Fedora within the Library Ecosystem - The lack of a complete interconnected open-source ecosystem can be a barrier to adoption of individual open-source applications like Fedora. What are the various workflows within your library ecosystem that digital preservation plays a role in? Which archival, catalog and discovery systems should integrate with Fedora? What data transformation processes need to happen before data can enter or leave Fedora? Are there commercial products in your ecosystem that you could replace with open-source alternatives if they connected easily out-of-the-box?
This will be an open discussion session to explore these and other questions, with a goal of informing work that is beginning on a 3-year, Lyrasis-funded, interoperability project within the Organizational Home.
Future Fedora Work - Open Discussion
Facilitator(s): Arran Griffith & Dan Field
This will be an open discussion session focused on bringing ideas and perspectives on future development work for the Fedora Program. As a community-led, open-source software, it is important to us that community voices are heard, and that community priorities are established based on continual feedback from users. We encourage all participants to bring their ideas and needs to the discussion so that the program can make informed decisions based on the needs of the community.
Getting Involved in the Community
Presenter: Arran Griffith, Program Manager
Arran will provide a brief overview of the many ways to get involved in the Fedora Community and discuss current and upcoming opportunities to participate.
