Leads on New Fedora Community Members, and DuraCloud Possibilities
Last Summary
- Guy Hussussian, R&D Director at VMWare, (ghussussian@vmware.com) I don't know where they are with it but Guy was leading an effort to bring Fedora in to VMWare to run their catalog of services. I spent a morning with the tech staff answering questions and there was definitely serious interest. I don't know how it has played out.
- Michael Levy, Digital Collections Director, US National Holocaust Museum (mlevy@ushmm.org) Michael is trying to get the Holocaust museum to get serious about digital collections. I made two visits, first a general Q&A attended by a wide variety of staff, then a focused session with the CIO and high-level techies. Good potential for a high-visibility use of Fedora in the museum world. They would most likely be a candidate for a service provider to do the work and have already been talking to Mark Leggott and maybe Matt Zumwalt.
- Jon Dunn, Indiana University (jwd@indiana.edu) Jon is the lead on a project to develop the 4th phase of the Variations project at IU which will add video to what is already the premier music teaching system available in higher ed. At a minimum, it appears that they will make it possible to integrate Variations with Fedora and DSpace. There is a chance that they could see Fedora as a key technology within the system itself. I served as an advisor in a meeting at IU in October for the planning grant effort to get a larger group together to go after grants to do the work. The main participants are IU and Northwestern U, but also possibly included are Ohio State, NYU, University of York (the UK one), Berkeley and Stanford.
- Marc Custer, Office of Publications, European Union Union (Marc.KUSTER@publications.europa.eu) I met Marc at a meeting where we were working on developing a whitepaper that talks about integrating repositories into virtual research environments. He is with the directorate of the EU that publishes all of the EU legal documents in all languages of the membership (currently 23 languages). They are beginning to use Fedora to do it. This will be a very interesting FRBR-oriented system. I spent 2 hours on the phone with the development team and, I think, succeeded in getting them on a better track to get started.
- Tobias Blanke and Mark HedgesBlanke (tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk) and Mark Hedges (mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk) , Centre for e-Research, Kings College London Tobias and Mark sponsored a meeting to discuss the integration of repositories with virtual research environments. We did the brainstorming at that meeting that is supposed to lead to a white paper. Participants included Alex Wade from Microsoft Research, Fabio Simeoni from Strathclyde U. who does the n-4-Cube VRE system.
- Dan Rehak (daniel.rehak.ctr@adlnet.gov) and Damon Regan (damon.regan.ctr@adlnet.gov), Advanced Distance Learning The ADL is a Dept. of Defense group that is a big developer of learning object based systems. They have strong relationships with the NSDL folks. I did a half-day Q&A with them about Fedora and DuraCloud. Dan is some kind of technical advisor and Damon is their lead developer person. In the two activities I have done with them there has been participation by other Defense folks, as well as NSF and Dept. of Education folks. They are a good connection into the ".GOV" effort initiated out of the White House to bring together all of the government information systems. They have a strong interest in Fedora, and both attended OR this year. Dan was the one who initiated the bid to sponsor OR in Washington, DC next year.
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- Steve Green, British Library (Stephen.Green@bl.uk) Steve was interested in Fedora and I went to the BL when I was last in London to hold a teleconference Q&A with his staff in Boston Spa, he and I were in London. The two guys we talked to were definitely industry/database-oriented guys. I did manage to dispel some misconceptions but didn't manage to get them over the finish line. They continue to engage with the Fedora community in the UK, however, and might actually get there.
- Sheila Anderson, e-Research Centre, Kings College London London (sheila.anderson@kcl.ac.uk) Sheila is definitely a player in the UK. She ran the Arts and Humanities Data Service before it got shut down, now is the director of the e-Research Centre at Kings. She is very knowledgeable about the interface of repositories and faculty research, especially but not limited to the humanities. She doesn't answer email almost ever...
- John Howard, University College Dublin (john.b.howard@ucd.ie) John is a head librarian who is also a programmer! He was the AUL for tech at Arizona State and has been a big Fedora supporter for many years. He is planning to take UCD Library into a major role as coordinating the digital stuff for the entire U. He has Vice-president status there and the President's ear. They have been Fedora users for a long time, but the library had never been central. There were a bunch of archives with different kinds of collections that were brought together to create a digital library in Fedora. When John came to UCD in 2009 he hired Sheila Anderson and I to do a review of their digital library program, so that he could ramp things up with better knowledge and more buy-in. Definitely someone to use when you need a supportive head librarian. I think that his ability to give money to things like sponsorship was limited this year, but may not be next.
- Steven Keegan, Trinity College Dublin (keeganst@tcd.ie) Steven was a new hire that is building a digital archive at Trinity for early books manuscripts and historical documents. I spent some time with him answering questions about Fedora which I believe he adopted.
- Greg Colati, U. of Denver Library Greg (greg.colati@du.edu) is an achivist at the library who oversees their digital stuff. He has a better tech staff than the Alliance does and often helps them with projects and he chairs their committee that is reviewing their repository strategy. I went out and spent a day reviewing with that committee. Greg is a big Fedora supporter. If it is not already know or obvious, he is married to Jessica (below) and is very influential with the Alliance.
- Jessica Colati, Colorado Alliance (Jessica@coalliance.org) Jessica directs the repository stuff at the Alliance. She has a minimal tech staff who, to put it bluntly, are not that sharp. She is very knowledgeable and effective but she is in a pretty difficult position. Note that she is often very slow to respond.
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- Jim Harrison, University of Virginia (james.harrison@virginia.edu) Jim is faculty in the medical school in the clinical information program. I have been working with him for about 3 years now, along with Martha Sites, Tim Sigmon and James Hilton, to help him use Fedora. He has put in a large NIH grant, "Life Sciences Grid" which is based on using Fedora. Note that he is doing this jointly with Andrew Grimshaw who is in computer sciences at UVA. Andrew has developed a new grid system (Genesis II) that will be part of it. I have encouraged them to look at an Akubra plugin for it. Note that I am listed as a consultant to the grant, so if they get it, I will be doing that on the side.
- Jeff Gima, American International Consortium of Academic Libraries (jgima@aup.fr) Jeff is the director of this group and is organizing the conference in Budapest that Susan Perry (below) hooked me up with. I have had some conversations with him about our products and their program. They are pretty small scale in most of their places but some interesting possiblilties exist for repository work and cloud services down the road. I will be doing a workshop about helping people to think about repositories conceptually, and talk a bit about Fedora, plus giving a keynote that further develops my "Scholarly Communication is a Web in the Clouds" theme.
- Michael Witt, Purdue University (Michael Witt is part of the Data Curation solution community, such as it is. He also is working with some grad students to do yet another comparison of DSpace, Eprints and Fedora. I have given him pretty extensive comments and connected him up with Val.
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