May 14, 2009
I am excited about the idea of this Fedora Community. As a consultant involved with digital asset management and repositories for many cultural heritage clients, I am continually frustrated with the solutions that I can bring to my clients. The commercial applications are not well suited to the cultural sector out of the box and are very expensive. Especially for the multitude of small and medium size institutions, not only are these issues a deterrence but the resources needed to implement and maintain these installations add another level of complication. I think the opportunity of an evolved open source solution utilizing Fedora is encouraging. Fedora is a proven corner stone for the security of the actual assets. What I believe is needed is an interface to allow users to easily interact with Fedora at different levels. This might be many different interfaces and modules. I would like to see a robust digital asset management piece to rival the commercial applications. I think this is possible with other pieces of open source software and the skill and knowledge of the many talented coders and developers out there (of which I unfortunately I am not). I think the concept of DuraSpace is very interesting in that it possibly solves another issue for small and medium archives, that of the hardware and computing power necessary to house an archive and the applications to utilize it. I have a great understanding of digital imaging workflow and what is needed. I welcome all those who would like to participate in creating something much needed. Dialogue through this wiki and community area is a terrific start. I have started to do my little part by installing a virtual volume of Ubuntu 9 and getting Apache , MySQL, , PHP, and Fedora up and running. Of course I have hit a wall trying to ingest assets with a permissions issue, so anyone who can render some assistance would be much appreciated. Once all is solved I want to explore some of the other tools out there like Drupal, Islandora and Hydra to see what an interface with workflow might look like. I will continue to post my thoughts and tribulations as I progress. I welcome dialogue and comments! Feel free to register and port your musings here or email me directly.
Thanks for your thoughts, assistance and indulgence
Howard Goldstein
Center for Digital imaging