This is the November 2019 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.

News

Islandora and Fedora Camp in Arizona

LYRASIS and the Islandora Foundation invite you to attend the first Islandora and Fedora Camp at Arizona State University, February 24-26, 2020.

Training will begin with the basics and build toward more advanced concepts–no prior Islandora or Fedora experience is required. Participants can expect to come away with a deep dive Islandora and Fedora learning experience coupled with multiple opportunities for applying hands-on techniques working with experienced trainers from both communities.

Recent Islandora Camps include the Switzerland camp at Lib4RI, the California camp at San Diego State University, and the Halifax camp at Mount Saint Vincent University. Recent Fedora Camps include the Atlanta camp at Emory University, the NASA camp at Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Texas camp at UT Austin.

The curriculum will be delivered by a knowledgeable team of instructors from the Islandora and Fedora communities, including:

  • David Wilcox, Fedora Program Leader, LYRASIS
  • Melissa Anez, Islandora Project and Community Manager, Islandora Foundation
  • Bethany Seeger, Digital Library Software Developer, Amherst College
  • Seth Shaw, Application Developer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
  • Danny Lamb, Technical Lead, Islandora Foundation

Register today and join us in Arizona! Register by January 13, 2020 to receive a $50 early bird discount using the promo code: FC20EB.

Fedora 6 Overview Webinar

Fedora 6, the next major version of Fedora, will focus on digital preservation by aligning with the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL). The OFCL is an application-independent approach to the storage of digital objects in a structured, transparent, and predictable manner. This provides many benefits, including content that is parsable by both humans and machines and the ability to rebuild the repository from the files it stores. Fedora 6 will replace the current ModeShape backend with a more scalable and performant implementation that persists data in accordance with the OCFL specification. This webinar will provide an overview of the Fedora 6 design, including a brief introduction to the OCFL and how it is being implemented, along with a summary of development progress to date and the anticipated timeline for the 6.0 release.

Register for the webinar, which will take place on Tuesday, December 3 at 10am EST.

Documentation Review Outcomes

We recently completed a one-day documentation review with a small group of Fedora community members, including:

  • Melissa Anez, Islandora Foundation
  • Paul Cummins, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Anna Dabrowski, Texas Advanced Computing Center
  • Jennifer Gilbert, National Library of Medicine
  • David Wilcox, LYRASIS

Each team member reviewed sections of the current Fedora documentation in order to identify areas of improvement, and a list of recommendations is available on the wiki. These recommendations will be included in the upcoming Fedora 6 sprint, and a dedicated documentation sprint will be scheduled in early 2020.

Oxford Common File Layout

The latest OCFL editors meeting took place on October 29. Notes from the call are available online. The meeting focused on support for extensions in the Object Root, for use cases like "mutable-head" content. The primary outcome was a new GitHub issue for adding language to the OCFL specification in support of such extensions. The next community call will take place on November 13.

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!

CNI Fall Meeting

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 Meeting will take place December 9-10 in Washington, DC. The agenda will include presentations from the Fedora community on Fedora 6 and the results of the Designing a Migration Path grant work.

Past Events

Presentations from the following events are now available:

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. This year's membership campaign has 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!

Get Involved

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.

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All content on the LYRASIS Wiki is licensed under the CC BY (Attribution) license, unless otherwise noted.