This is the April 2018 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. We will be kicking off our 2018 membership campaign in the Spring but it's never too early to join or upgrade your membership! If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us today!

Fedora Camp at NASA

You are invited to join experienced trainers at Fedora Camp to be held May 16-18 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. Fedora Camp offers everyone a chance to dive in and learn all about the latest version of Fedora. 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. 

The instructor team will include experienced community members and the DuraSpace Fedora team:

• Danny Bernstein, DuraSpace
• Esmé Cowles, Princeton University
• Josh Westgard, University of Maryland
• David Wilcox, DuraSpace
• Andrew Woods, DuraSpace

Registration closes on May 1 so be sure to register soon! Attendance is limited to the first 30 registrants.

Software development 

Standards

Fedora API Specification

The Candidate Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still available for public review.

As described in the charter, this specification is designed to:

1. Define the characteristics and expectations of how clients interact with Fedora implementations
2. Define such interactions such that an implementation’s conformance is testable
3. 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 core HTTP and notification services defined in this specification are listed below, along with the associated standards from which they are derived:

1. Resource Management (Linked Data Platform)
2. Resource Versioning (Memento)
3. Resource Authorization (Web Access Controls)
4. Notifications (Activity Streams)
5. Extended Binary Resource Operations
   • Fixity (HTTP headers)

The public comment period for the Candidate Recommendation will remain open until the Spring, after which we are targeting the release of the full Recommendation. Minimum requirements for transitioning to releasing the Recommendation include:

• Specification compliance test suite
• Two or more implementations of the specification
• No unresolved, outstanding critical issues, as defined by the specification editors

Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.

Community-driven Activity

New Committers

We are pleased to welcome to new people to the Fedora committer group:

• Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech
• Peter Eichman, University of Maryland

Fedora is developed collectively by a community of contributors and committers. All interested community members are encouraged to contribute to the project. Contributors who demonstrate sustained engagement with the project through quality participation in meetings, mailing lists, documentation and code updates can be nominated by existing committers to also become a committer. Yinlin and Peter have both demonstrated this kind of sustained engagement, and we are thrilled to have them on the team!

Alignment with API Specification

As part of the completion of the Fedora API specification, the current implementation will need to be brought into alignment with the documented specification. To this end, we are scheduling two code sprints to complete the alignment work. The first sprint, which ran from March 5 to March 16, has been completed. We made excellent headway on this sprint toward our ultimate goal of full API alignment.  We benefited from the full-time commitment of seven contributors as well as significant support from two other committers representing six institutions:

• Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
• Ben Pennell, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Danny Bernstein, DuraSpace
• Joe Harrington, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Longshou Situ, University of California, San Diego
• Randall Floyd, Indiana University
• Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech

In the course of the ten working days we closed 27 tickets which included major new functionality in the Memento implementation. A handful of other tickets are slated for completion during the inter-sprint hiatus.

We have nine contributors who have signed up for the next sprint which starts April 16th and runs through the 27th:

• Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
• Bethany Seeger, Amherst College
• Danny Bernstein, DuraSpace
• Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
• Longshou Situ, University of California, San Diego
• Mohamed Abdul Rasheed, University of Maryland
• Peter Eichman, University of Maryland
• Randall Floyd, Indiana University
• Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech

This is an extremely important milestone for the Fedora project. If you are interested and available to participate in the next sprint, please add your name to the sprint planning page.

Oxford Common File Layout

The third OCFL call took place on Friday, March 9. Notes, video, and audio are available online. This call featured updates on work in-progress from institutions working on OCFL-related efforts and a review of comments on the OCFL Discussion Paper. We are also collecting use cases in a GitHub repository. The next meeting will be on Friday, May 25th at 11am ET. Please join the pasig-discuss mailing list for further updates.

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 .
If you have not already joined the fedora-project Slack workspace please start by visiting the self-registration form. Come join the conversation!

Upcoming Events

CNI

The CNI Spring Meeting will take place April 12-13 in San Diego, CA. 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. Each member organization may send two representatives. The program will include an update on the Fedora vision, strategy, and roadmap.

ILIDE

Taking place April 15-18, the Innovative Library in Digital Era conference will present visionary and original ideas based on the extensive experience of the participating experts and institutions. This year's program will include an update on current Fedora developments and future plans. Please register in advance to attend.

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The annual Digital Initiatives Symposium will take place April 23-24 at the University of California, San Diego. This day-and-a-half conference focuses on the digital elements of library ecosystems and features workshops and user group meetings for a variety of institutional repository platforms. The agenda will include a Fedora User Group meeting. Please register in advance to attend.

Southern Miss IR Conference

The Southern Miss IR Conference will take place April 26-27 at the University of Southern Mississippi. It is an opportunity for Institutional Repository (IR) managers to come together and learn about new ideas and strategies that their colleagues are using at their institution to meet the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. The conference will include a Fedora demo and a presentation on selecting an open source IR platform. Please register in advance to attend.

Previous Events

West Coast Samvera Regional Meeting

The Digital Services Division of the Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno (Fresno State) hosted the 2018 West Coast Samvera Regional Group meeting on March 16. Notes are available on the event page.

Research Data Management Symposium

This International Symposium on The critical role of university Research Data Management infrastructure in transforming data to knowledge took place in Göttingen, Germany from 18-20 March 2018 as a precursor event to the RDA plenary meeting in Berlin on 21-23 March 2018. David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, attended to present on Fedora as research data shared services infrastructure. 

Research Data Alliance 11th Plenary Meeting

The 11th RDA Plenary Meeting took place from the 21st to the 23rd March 2018 in Berlin, Germany. Fedora-related initiatives include the work being done by the Research Data Repository Interoperability working group to leverage the import/export utility for research data packaging and transmission between repository platforms, and the Repository Platforms for Research Data interest group.

LDCX

LDCX 2018, which took place March 26-28, continues the tradition of bring together institutions and technologists with common needs and concerns to collaborate at the intersection of cultural heritage and technology. As in previous years, additional meetings were hosted around LDCX, including a Samvera Developers Congress, a Samvera Partners meeting, and the LOCKSS Alliance Meeting (both held March 29-30, 2018).