This is the November 2016 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.

Fedora Camp in NYC

Fedora Camp in NYC [1], hosted by Columbia University Libraries, will be offered at Columbia University’s Butler Library in New York City November 28-30, 2016. Training will begin with the basics and build toward more advanced concepts–no prior Fedora 4 experience is required. Participants can expect to come away with a deep dive Fedora 4 learning experience coupled with multiple opportunities for applying hands-on techniques working with experienced trainers and Fedora gurus. 

Single-day rates are now available for those who can't attend the entire camp. Register today [2] and join us in New York!

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 [3], 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. The 2016 membership campaign has so far raised $557,250 from 67 members. The annual goal this year is $580,000, so we are over 96% of the way there. We will continue to coordinate with members of the Fedora Leadership Group to expand the pool of DuraSpace members supporting the Fedora project and build a sustainable funding base for the future. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us [4]!

Software development 

4.7.0 Release Candidate

The Fedora 4.7.0 release candidate is now available for testing [5]. This release upgrades versions of the underlying persistence application, which will require a straightforward backend data migration. If you have an existing Fedora 4 repository, you are requested to test backing up your existing repository, followed by restoring it into an installation of the 4.7.0 release candidate repository. See RESTful HTTP API - Backup and Restore [6] for more details.

Standards

Fedora API Specification

The Fedora community is working to establish a clearly defined specification for the core Fedora services [7]. This specification will detail the exact services and interactions required for a server implementation to be verified as "doing Fedora". 

You are invited to comment on and contribute to the draft specifications [8].

Semantic Versioning

Based on recent community discussion [9], two key pieces of community feedback have been made clear:

  1. There is a strong desire for Fedora releases to conform to standard semantic versioning [10]
  2. There is a strong desire to minimize the number of major releases of Fedora to one per year; where a major release is defined by having non-backwards compatible changes.

Following the 4.7.0 release and once an approach has been established towards addressing the branding issues related to Fedora versions and the name "Fedora 4", we will attempt to reflect both of these points in future Fedora releases.

Community-driven Activity

Import/Export Tooling

One of the design goals of Fedora is to simplify the process of both getting your resources into and out of Fedora in a standardized way. This enables the reuse of Fedora resources in other contexts, such as exporting to a separate preservation system, as well as provides a pathway for migrating across Fedora installations, such as migrating from a LevelDB backend to PostgreSQL. Half of the problem is solved with the existing GET/POST interactions for RDF and non-RDF resources provided by the Linked Data Platform API. The other half should be addressed by tooling external to Fedora. In addition to the basic import/export of simple RDF and non-RDF resources, there is also significant community interest in supporting import/export of BagIt bags.
The work has been broken into phases - phase 1 priorities [11] have been addressed in the first sprint, and initial stakeholder testing and validation is now complete. Meetings for phase 2 have been scheduled [12], and the code sprints will begin in December. Please join in to contribute use cases, development effort, and testing.

API Extension Architecture 

The Fedora API Extension Architecture (API-X) working group has been planning a milestone release and associated demo of the API-X framework and an assortment of extensions.  While this does not represent a production release, the framework has matured to the point where it is ready for a round of evaluation and feedback.  They are currently working on an overview and evaluation guide for this demo, an initial skeleton [13] is available on the wiki. If you are interested in evaluating the demo when it is released in order to provide this valuable feedback, please place your name as an evaluator on the page, or stay tuned for further communication.

The API-X team holds regular biweekly meetings. The next meeting will take place on Thursday, November 10 at 1pm Eastern time.

Performance and Scalability

The Performance and Scalability group met on October 24 to review summaries of completed tests [14]. The group agreed to bring together summaries of tests run across different environments and elevate these to the community mailing lists. To aid in this effort, a script is available [15] to output the characteristics of a test system.

If you are interested in Performance and Scalability, please join the discussion on the fedora-community mailing list [16] and attend the next meeting [17] on November 21.

Conferences and events

Upcoming Events

DLF

The 2016 DLF Forum [18] will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 7-9, 2016. Digital Preservation 2016 [19] will be held in conjunction with the Forum, from November 9-10. An Introduction to Fedora 4 workshop [20] will be offered on November 8, along with a project update [21] on November 7.

LITA Forum

The 2016 LITA Forum [22] will take place November 17-20 in Fort Worth, Texas. It is the conference where technology meets the practicality of daily information operations in archives, libraries, and other information services. David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, will present an update on the Fedora project [23].

CNI

The 2016 CNI Fall Membership Meeting [24] will take place December 12-13 in Washington, DC. 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 meeting will feature several presentations from Fedora community members, including panel discussions on digital preservation and integration with OSF [25].

Previous Events

Hydra Connect

Hydra Connect [26] took place October 3-6 in Boston, MA. 258 Hydra Project participants gathered to share knowledge on the Hydra framework, linked data, Fedora, project management, ruby programming, and metadata. A master list of all sessions [27], including slides and audio/video (where available) can be found on the wiki.

iPRES

The 13th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) [28] took place in Bern, Switzerland from October 3-6, 2016. iPRES is the longest standing digital preservation conference in the world. This important event brings together key theorists, researchers and practitioners to explore the latest trends, innovations, policies and practices in digital preservation. David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, offered an introductory Fedora 4 tutorial [29] on October 6, and a Fedora User Group Meeting [30] was held on October 7.

eResearch Australasia

The annual eResearch Australasia [31] conference took place October 10-14 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Esmé Cowles, form Princeton University Library, traveled on behalf of the Fedora project to present a Hydra/Fedora workshop and a talk on curating research data with Hydra and PCDM. The workshop was well-attended, with lots of interest in Fedora and Hydra. Esmé demoed a number of existing Hydra heads, including Plum, Scholarsphere, Avalon, and UCSD DAMS.

Islandora Camp Missouri

Islandora Camp [32] took place in Kansas City, MO on October 12-14. The camp was held at the University of Missouri-Kansas City for three days and included Islandora sessions, workshops, and community presentations. 34 Islandorians from across the US and Canada came together to share how they use Islandora and learn more about how to extend it. Topics included: the State of Islandora CLAW [33], how the University of Missouri does Islandora [34], and how great custom sites like Bowing Down Home [35] are put together. For the full slate of sessions, check out the Camp Schedule [36].

References

[1]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/Events/Fedora+Camp+NYC+-+28-30+November+2016
[2]  http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07ecup3dqg1c82f3d5&llr=5iy95gcab
[3]  https://jira.duraspace.org/issues/?filter=13122
[4]  http://www.duraspace.org/become_a_member
[5]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Release+Testing+-+4.7.0
[6]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA4x/RESTful+HTTP+API+-+Backup+and+Restore
[7]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORAAPI/Fedora+Specification
[8]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORAAPI/Specification+Draft
[9]  https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fedora-tech/sTB7XzQn1ik/Cndo0fY7EgAJ
[10] http://semver.org/
[11] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Design+-+Import+-+Export
[12] https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/fedora-community/FEUmoVKX5BQ
[13] https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=78157890
[14] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2016-08-15+Performance+-+Scale+meeting
[15] https://github.com/fcrepo4-archive/ff-jmeter-testResults/blob/master/2013-06-03-Fedora4Tests/gatherSystemInfo.sh
[16] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fedora-community
[17] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2016-11-21+Performance+-+Scale+meeting
[18] https://www.diglib.org/forums/2016forum/
[19] http://ndsa.diglib.org/meetings/
[20] https://www.conftool.pro/dlf2016/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=36&presentations=show
[21] https://www.conftool.pro/dlf2016/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=21&presentations=show
[22] http://forum.lita.org/
[23] http://forum.lita.org/sessions/fedora-4-project-update/
[24] https://www.cni.org/events/membership-meetings/upcoming-meeting/fall-2016
[25] https://osf.io/
[26] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+Connect+2016
[27] https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=78156660
[28] http://www.ipres2016.ch/
[29] http://www.ipres2016.ch/frontend/index.php?page_id=2833
[30] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/Events/Bern+Fedora+User+Group+Meeting%3A+7+October+2016
[31] https://conference.eresearch.edu.au/
[32] http://islandora.ca/camps/mo2016
[33] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19P5gMF4z8DMX2sE-tQGFVwyj9z0MLy17C53U5RGkHkc/edit?usp=sharing
[34] http://islandora.ca/camps/mo2016/sites/default/files/Journey%20to%20the%20center%20of%20Missouri.pdf
[35] http://islandora.ca/sites/default/files/Bowing%20Down%20Home%20%20-%20Islandora%20iCampMO.pdf
[36] http://islandora.ca/camps/mo2016/schedule
 
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