This is the September 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 concluded with $564,750 in funding and 74 members. The 2017 membership campaign kicked off in May, and so far the Fedora project has raised $529,750 from 68 members. The annual goal this year is $580,000, so we are over 90% 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!
New Members
We would like to thank the University Library of Bern for joining as a Silver member and the University of Michigan Medical School for joining as a Bronze member in support of Fedora. We are thrilled to have two new member institutions! For more information on membership and benefits please see the DuraSpace website.
Training
Fedora Camp Texas
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! Local accommodations are available at a reduced rate.
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The initial public working draft of the Fedora API Specification is still available for broader public review.
As described in the specification charter, this specification is designed to:
- Define the characteristics and expectations of how clients interact with Fedora implementations
- Define such interactions such that an implementation’s conformance is testable
- Enable interoperability by striving to minimize the need for modifications to client applications in order to work with different implementations of the Fedora API specification
The initial working draft will remain open for public comment until November, at which time we are planning to graduate the specification to a “candidate recommendation”. Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments or if you would like to participate in implementation and/or test suite sprints. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
Community-driven Activity
4.7.4 Release
The Fedora 4.7.4 release is now available. It is a backwards compatible refinement of the previous release, which adds a new option to allow a client to overwrite what were previously server-managed triples in order to facilitate lossless import/export operations. This release also allows Amazon S3 to be used as a storage option.
Fedora News Articles
Two recently released Fedora article series are available:
“Fedora 4 in Production” looks into why and how community members are working with Fedora 4 to enhance both collections and workflow at their institutions. The first article in the series features Dan Coughlin, IT Manager, Digital Scholarship and Repository Development, Penn State Libraries, who describes Fedora 4 in production at Penn State ScholarSphere. The second article features Allen Flynn, Research Analyst and Technology Lead at the University of Michigan Medical School, who describes Fedora 4 development of the Knowledge Grid, an open repository of digital knowledge objects aimed at keeping health information accessible and safe at the University of Michigan Medical School and beyond.
The "Contributor Profiles" series recognizes our contributors’ achievements, and introducing them to the rest of the community. The series includes Nick Ruest from York University, Bethany Seeger from Amherst College, Danny Bernstein from DuraSpace, and Aaron Birkland from Johns Hopkins University.
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 .
Previous Events
VIVO Conference
The annual VIVO conference brought together users, managers and developers from around the world to share the latest developments in semantic web academic profiles. This year's conference featured a workshop on Fedora and a session on integrating VIVO with Fedora. Stay tuned for opportunities to participate in this effort!
IFLA WLIC
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) took place August 19-25 in Poland. David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, attended the congress to present a paper on Fedora and research data. He also co-wrote and presented a paper on Fedora and digital preservation with Evviva Weinraub from Northwestern University.
South Central States Fedora User Group Meeting
A South Central States Fedora User Group meeting took place August 23-24 at Texas A&M University. The meeting featured discussions and presentations from regional Fedora community members as well as DuraSpace representatives. Slides and meeting notes can be found on the wiki.
Upcoming Events
PASIG
The next Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group meeting will take place September 11-13 at Oxford University. The meeting will include presentations from members of the Fedora community, including a lightning talk on Fedora and digital preservation from Erin Tripp, DuraSpace Business Development Manager.
RDA 10th Plenary Meeting
The 10th Research Data Alliance Plenary Meeting will take place September 19-21 in Montreal, Quebec. The meeting will feature several group discussions relevant to Fedora, including the Research Data Repository Interoperability working group and the Repository Platforms for Research Data interest group. Please register in advance to attend.
iPRES
The 14th International Conference on Digital Preservation will take place September 25-29 in Kyoto, Japan. The conference program includes a Fedora workshop and a presentation on importing and exporting data to and from Fedora. Please register in advance to attend.
