This is the January 2017 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. The 2016 membership campaign raised a total of $564,750 from 74 members. The annual goal was $580,000, so we raised over 97% of our target funding. Thank you to all the institutions that supported Fedora in 2016, and to our Leadership Group for their hard work in advocating for Fedora around the world. Our 2017 membership campaign will kick off in a few months, and if your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us!

Software development 

4.7.1 Release Candidate

The Fedora 4.7.1 release candidate is now available for testing. Please follow the instructions on the release testing page to verify that there are no issues with the release candidate before we publish an official release. Widespread community release testing mitigates regressions and others issues that may arise as the codebase changes over time.

Standards

Fedora API Specification

The Fedora community is working to establish a clearly defined specification for the core Fedora services. 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 specification.

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 requirements were addressed in the first two sprints, and phase 2 requirements have been addressed in the latest sprint in December. Please join in to contribute use cases, development effort, and testing.

API Extension Architecture 

The first milestone release of the API Extension Architecture is now publically available. A Docker-based demonstration of API-X with accompanying step-by-step evaluation guide has been prepared for those who are interested in concretely exploring API-X and providing valuable feedback. Please take a look at it, give it a try, and provide feedback. An introductory video providing an overview of API-X can also be found on YouTube. This milestone and demo represents the culmination of a year of design and development effort from a broad swath of the Fedora community, and has been helped along by an IMLS National Digital Platform grant.

The API-X team holds regular bi-weekly meetings. The next meeting will take place on Thursday, January 19 at 1pm Eastern time.

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 .

Upcoming Events

South Central States Fedora Users Group Meeting

The South Central States Fedora Users Group will meet January 11-12 in Houston, TX . The meeting will include presentations on current implementations, discussion for users considering Fedora, workshops led by Fedora experts and developers, and conversations intended to foster collaboration among users and in support of the Fedora project. Space is limited so please register in advance for the meeting.

IDCC

The 12th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC)  will be held in Edinburgh from February 20-23, 2017 bringing together digital curation professionals and educators with data producers and consumers to consider digital curation in a multi-disciplinary context. David Wilcox, Fedora product manager for DuraSpace, will offer a full-day Fedora workshop, “Curating Digital Content with Fedora,” on Thursday, February 23. The main conference runs from February 21-22. Workshop registration details may be found on the conference website. There is a  £90 charge for the workshop paid to conference organizers.

Previous Events

CNI

The 2016 CNI Fall Membership Meeting took 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 featured several presentations from Fedora community members:

Representatives from the Center for Open Science, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Notre Dame, and DuraSpace participated in a well-attended panel discussion on integrating Fedora with the Open Science Framework. By integrating preservation into research workflows, archiving and preservation would move from being distinct activities following the active research phase to more continuous activities that are part of researchers' existing workflows throughout the research lifecycle. Furthermore, this work will enable the true mission of preservation by facilitating reuse and retrieval of archived data and files into subsequent research projects.

Fedora Leadership Group members from Northwestern University, Stanford University, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Virginia participated in a vigorous panel discussion on the role of Fedora in a digital preservation solution. This informal discussion featured active audience participation around the complexities of digital preservation; the vocabulary is not well-defined, and many people use the same terms with different meanings. A long-term digital preservation strategy incorporates many components, including repositories with digital preservation features, geographically and functionally diverse storage systems, organisational, financial, and legal succession plans, and compliance with best-practice recommendations. Ultimately, no single piece of software offers a complete digital preservation solution (nor can it) but it is clear that Fedora can play a key role in such a solution.


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