This is the March 2019 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.
Register Your Repository
Is your repository listed in the DuraSpace registry? Help us maintain reliable information on the community of Fedora users around the world by registering your repository today. You can also request an update to an existing entry by selecting your entry and filling out the online form.
Membership
Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of DuraSpace members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. We will be kicking off this year's membership campaign with a goal of raising $500,000 to fund staff to work on Fedora and provide technical leadership, direct strategic planning, organize community outreach, and coordinate timely software releases. Membership also provides opportunities to participate in project governance and influence the direction of the software. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us today!
Fedora Camp in Atlanta
You are invited to join experienced trainers at Fedora Camp to be held May 20-22 at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Fedora Camp, hosted by Emory University Libraries, offers everyone a chance to dive in and learn all about 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 and Fedora gurus.
Previous Fedora Camps include the inaugural camp held at Duke University, the West Coast camp at CalTech, NYC camp at Columbia U, Texas camp at UT Austin, and NASA Camp at Goddard Space Flight Center. The camp curriculum will provide a comprehensive overview of Fedora by exploring such topics as:
- Core & Integrated features
- Data modeling and linked data
- Samvera and Islandora
- Migrating to Fedora
- Deploying Fedora in production
- Preservation Services
The curriculum will be delivered by a knowledgeable team of instructors from the Fedora community including, David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, Andrew Woods and Danny Bernstein, Fedora Technical Leads, and Jared Whiklo from the University of Manitoba.
View a sample agenda.
Register today and join us in Atlanta!
Designing a Migration Path Grant Update
The Designing a Migration Path grant work continued in February with the second phase of the project. The team worked on profiling a number of Fedora 3.x repositories to determine commonalities and differences with regard to migrations to the latest version of Fedora. We also tested the draft survey using cognitive interviews with advisory board members, which will help us complete the final version. At the same time, we've been drafting documents on the Fedora API specification and the Oxford Common File Layout with regard to their impact on repository migrations. Details will be made available on the wiki as these tasks are completed.
Keep an eye on this newsletter for monthly updates on our progress.
Software development
Community-driven Activity
Fedora 6.0 Design Meeting
Members of the Fedora committers team met in person to design Fedora 6.0. This next release will focus on:
- Compliance with the Oxford Common File Layout
- Including transparency and support for rebuilding the repository from the files on disk
- Better performance and scale
- Minimizing change to the user via the API
The design also includes a simple query service and support for migrations from earlier versions of Fedora. More details can be found on the wiki.
Fedora 5.0.2 Release
This release is a backwards compatible (with 5.0.0) bugfix release. It neither adds nor removes features.
The bugs addressed:
- Resolve a build issue on the Windows operating system
- Resolve an underlying library security vulnerability
- Resolve a regression introduced in 5.0.1 related to access authorization to binary resources
- Resolve a null pointer exception under a specific sequence of actions within transactions
Download Fedora 5.0.2.
Introducing CAP (Curators' Administrative Platform) from Texas A&M University Libraries
The Applications Development team at Texas A&M University Libraries has prototyped an application called CAP (Curators' Administrative Platform) to enable dynamic customization of
metadata application profiles for Fedora repositories and to facilitate the basic interactions with the Fedora REST API. Read more
Fedora 5.x Documentation
In tandem with the 5.0 release, we are reviewing and updating the project documentation. Creating and maintaining accurate and up-to-date documentation is equally as important as software development, so please contribute to this effort.
Oxford Common File Layout
A 0.2 (Alpha) release of the OCFL spec was recently announced. You are invited to provide feedback, which will be discussed on future community calls.
The most recent OCFL community call took place on Wednesday, March 13. Notes and audio are available online. This call included community updates from the Fedora project, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins, and opportunities to help with Beta issues. Please join the ocfl-community 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
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 next CNI Spring Membership Meeting will take place April 8-9 in St. Louis, MO. The agenda will include presentations from both Fedora and OCFL representatives. Details can be found on the CNI website.
ACRL
The next ACRL conference takes place April 10-13 in Cleveland, OH. Fedora Tech Lead Danny Bernstein will deliver an introductory Fedora workshop at the conference on Friday, April 12. Please register in advance to attend.
