This is the May 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.
Fedora Camp Texas
We are pleased to announce that Fedora Camp Texas, co-hosted by Texas Digital Library and the University of Texas Libraries, will be offered at the University of Texas at Austin's Perry-Castañeda Library in Austin October 16-18, 2017. Training will begin with the basics and build toward more advanced concepts–no prior Fedora experience is required. Participants can expect to come away with a deep dive Fedora learning experience coupled with multiple opportunities for applying hands-on techniques working with experienced trainers and Fedora gurus.
Register today and join us in Austin! An early bird rate is available and attendance is limited to the first 40 registrants. Local accommodations are available at a reduced rate.
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The Fedora community is working to establish a clearly defined specification for the core Fedora services. This specification details the exact services and interactions required for a server implementation to be verified as "doing Fedora".
A charter for the specification effort has been published, and an editorial team has been established. The team members include:
- Ben Armintor, Columbia University
- Esmé Cowles, Princeton University
- Danny Lamb, Islandora Foundation
- Simeon Warner, Cornell University
- Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
The draft specification has been published and is looking for community comments. Following this round of input, we plan on an initial release of the specification in the spring of 2017.
Community-driven Activity
Fedora Contributor Profiles
The Fedora project relies on many individuals and institutions to ensure the project's success. We are grateful for their commitment and will showcase their contributions in a series of community profiles aimed at recognizing our contributors’ achievements, and introducing them to the rest of the community. The second article in the Fedora Repository Contributor Profile series features Bethany Seeger from Amherst College Library, who has been a contributor to the Fedora repository team for two years. Her focus is on MODS XML to RDF mapping as Amherst College Library migrates to Fedora 4. The full article can be found on the DuraSpace website.
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. This design goal is being met by an external import/export tool that supports transacting in RDF and (optionally) BagIt bags.
We have organized another code sprint to address phase 3 requirements to take place May 15-26. If you would like to participate as developer, tester, or to write documentation, please contact Andrew Woods.
API-X
John Hopkins University has finished the package ingest extension, while the Islandora community is working on a Tesseract extension for OCR extraction use cases. A successful API-X workshop was delivered at the DC Area Fedora Users Group meeting and a section on API-X will be included in the Fedora workshop at Open Repositories in June.
If you would like to participate in the API-X effort, please attend the next meeting on May 11.
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 .
Advanced Hydra Camp
Data Curation Experts is offering an Avanced Hydra Camp on May 8-10 in Minneapolis, MN. This camp is for developers with a year or more hands-on Hydra development experience who have already attended Hydra Camp or have equivalent knowledge. Please register in advance to attend.
Fedora Webinar
A webinar on Powered Linked Data and Hosted Solutions with Fedora will be held on Tuesday, May 16 at 9:30am AEST (convert to your timezone). Please register in advance. Note this webinar is open to all, however the date/time information above is based on the Eastern Australian time zone. For those outside Eastern Australia use the time zone converter to see what day/time the webinar will take place for you.
Islandora Conference
The second Islandoracon will be held in Hamilton, Ontario from May 15 - 19, 2017. The conference schedule will take place over five days, including a day of post-conference sessions and a full-day Hackfest. Please register in advance to attend.
North East Regional Hydra Meeting
The next North East Hydra meeting will be held at Northeastern University on May 22, 2017. Please register in advance if you'd like to attend.
ELAG
ELAG (European Library Automation Group) Conference is Europe’s premier conference on the application, development and implementation of information technology in libraries and documentation centers. This year's conference will feature a Fedora bootcamp led by David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager. Please register in advance to attend the bootcamp.
Open Repositories
The annual Open Repositories Conference brings together users and developers of open digital repository platforms from higher education, government, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The University of Queensland (UQ), Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Griffith University will host the conference 26-30 June 2017 at the Hilton Brisbane. This year's conference will feature workshops, panels, and presentations from members of the Fedora, Hydra, and Islandora communities. Please register in advance to attend.
