Community Leads

Leads on New Fedora Community Members

July, 2009

• Arizona State University visit

• Keith Kintigh, ASU and Archeoinformatics

• John Howard, ASU now, moving to be head librarian at City U. Dublin

• Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Conference

• Bob Downs, The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia U.

• Steve Morris, North Carolina State University Library

• Bruce Wilson, Oak Ridge National Laboratories

June, 2009

• DL.ORG Working Group meeting

• Bram vander Werf, Europeana

• Rob Sanderson, U. of Liverpool now, moving to LANL

• David Hon, Goddard Space Flight Center David was at the Goddard presentation, and he got really intrigued with the idea of the Scholars Workbench community group. If I understood correctly, he is a contractor working for another part of Goddard (not the library). He is very interested in applying the concept to the Planetary Misson projects that NASA is starting up. These are multi-year projects that combine research and creative speculation, creating lots of information in collaborative activities. He is going to make a connection to get me together with Bob Hozon, the guy at NASA who is putting together the proposals for these planetary missions.

• Small Archives solution community We had another phone call. We made plans to create a survey to be sent out in September. The cover letter of that survey will talk about the solution community as well as gather info. We are planning to have a BOF at the Museum Computer Network conference in November. The survey will be timed to encourage attendance at that event.

• Washington, DC area users group At the Goddard presentation, Mitzi Cole circulated a signup-sheet that asked the question about interest in forming a users group. There was lots of interest and agreement to have a first meeting sometime in August. Andrew and I agreed to attend. I also offered to have a session for interested parties on the next day that was a seminar on content modeling with Fedora. There was strong interest in that.

• Presentation at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center After talking to Goddard folks on the phone last February, they wanted to have me come and do the standard talk with them. I asked them to invite others that they knew were interested in Fedora from the area. We had a group of about 27 (I think) from Goddard, NOAA library, National Library of Medicine and U. of Maryland. We had agreed that I would do the presentation with questions in the first 45m minutes to an hour, then do a seminar/Q&A for programmers. It ended up being a 3 hour combination of the two, because people asked lots of questions and we had lots of conversation. Everyone said that they got lots of what they needed. Andrew Woods went with me. He participated and took notes which he put up under the community events section of this wiki.

• Data Curation solution community We had a call with Sayeed Choudry (Johns Hopkins), Michael Witt (Purdue), Brian (ICPSR) and myself. Talked about how we could get the structure of the wiki set up to start to encourage input. Sayeed is going to talk to some people at the Illinois School of Information to get a grad student to work with us.

May, 2009

• Solution Community Interns Program This is an idea that I got yesterday after talking to everyone. Sayeed's idea of involving a grad student gave me the idea. What if we started an interns program that placed an information school student with each community? They could do more of the leg work, organizing meetings, working on the wiki, creating surveys, etc. It would seem to be a real benefit to them in career networking, if not in other formal ways. I thought I would talk to John Unsworth when I return to see what he thinks. I would think that getting students interested in working with both the data curation effort and the small cultural heritage community would have real appeal. It may also be the way to get the publishing one going. Other obvious candidates are UNC and Simmons in Boston. Ari mentioned that they have had interns from Simmons.

• Small Archives Solution Community I had a phone call yesterday with Ari Davidow and Howard Goldstein (see below). Ari was already moving on being the steward and Howard stepped up to being the evangelist. They are going to be looking for a wiki gardener while I am gone. This one seems like it really has some momentum building. I want to have a conversation about it with both Don and Kevin Guthrie when I return. It directly relates to Aluka and other things that Ithaka and Mellon have been doing.

• Australian Government National Resource Management (AGNRM) This is the guy (Romulo Severino) who is worried about the Java admin client going away. They are using it as their application. I have told them that is a bad idea, but ... He makes big noise about all of the new government agencies that his project is going bring to Fedora. It may be true but he seems to have an exaggerated idea of his importance, shall we say. I told him that they could probably take over the client as committers and keep it going and in synch with the general releases, but that he would have to talk to Chris to see if that were a good idea and how it would work.

• Alex Siedlecki This is the guy who I talked to about a year and a half ago about doing a project that was an archive for the fashion industry. Apparently, that one is done now and he is working on something related to Tibetan stuff, from which he got pointed back to me. He is fairly secretive about what he is doing, but he did say that the fashion-thing will soon be public and he will let me know when it is.

• Martha Sites, UVA, Mellon Grant Martha has been asked by Don to submit the grant proposal that we had been talking about back at the beginning of the Hydra Project. The partners will include Stanford, Hull and Yale, probably. It is about building the framework for special collections libraries to be able to collect famous people's born-digital stuff. It's not so much about the infrastructure but it will help focus the next round of work on Hydra. Our observation is that what the archivists need to do this is very much like what a scholar's workbench does anyway, maybe with some special workflows and services. It will very much be a way to move Hydra forward, especially by including content models for other media, new workflow services and to begin to integrate tools for use on top of Hydra. Each of the partners will actually use Hydra to do some collections, and will create a body of documentation and best practices.

• Myron Guttman (ICPSR) and Data Curation community Myron was a keynote speaker at the Data Curation conference in Pretoria. He and I talked about what to do to goose the Data Curation community along. He is going to talk to one of his people about the possibility joining in. I mentioned to Sayeed about getting someone to work with him on the steward role and he is interested. he also brought up the idea of getting an interested grad student or junior researcher involved. I talked to Sayeed yesterday and he thinks its a good idea to get them involved in the leadership for the community.

• Dale Peters, DRIVER I had a really good series of talks with Dale about a variety of things. It is pretty clear that there is a natural connection point for DRIVER and DuraSpace between us and we will stay in touch. She is interested in Pat Liebetrau's notion of DISA being the central hub for the region that DRIVER is looking for. Note that she was Pat's boss at DISA before going to DRIVER.

• Pat Liebetrau, DISA Project, Durban, South Africa I gave a presentation at the U. of KwaZulu-Natal, sponsored by Pat entititled, "The Future of Scholarly Communication is a Web in the Clouds." I also met with the DISA folks. They are ready to be a central hub in a network of small cultural heritage archives in southern Africa. Pat is very interested in the possibility of running DSpace instances in the cloud that feed back to the DISA Fedora repo for long-term management. She is very interested in the Small Archives community and I have already put her in touch with Ari Davidow.

April, 2009

• The History and Philosphy of Science This is a group of humanities computing projects that have gotten together to try to get funding to do a generalized approach to their kind of humanities computing. The meeting that I went to at Woods Hole, sponsored by Cathy Norton was for this group, which included people from Max Planck, MBL, Indiana U., Johns Hopkins and Arizona State. Matthias Razum and John Howard were both at the meeting. They are all very interested in using Fedora for this, all at institutions where Fedora is well entrenched already. At the moment they are working on some funding from NSF, who is paying for these workshops which are supposed to be bringing the community together for common solutions.

• David Bearman and Jennifer Trant I saw them at the Museums and the Web conference which their company, Archives and Museum Informatics (http://www.archimuse.com/), puts on. These guys are very important in the museum world and would be very useful for DuraSpace to make new contacts. The museum space seems ripe for cloud services.

• Ari Davidow We had a breakfast BOF to talk about starting a community around small cultural heritage organizations using Fedora, probably to be called "Samll Archives" for simplicity reasons. We didn't get all that many people but Ari and a guy named Howard Goldstein (see below) were both very interested in getting started. This community will be aimed at bringing together mid-level decision makers to put together a use case and specs for a system that could be used for small archives. The main goal would then be to secure funding and hire someone to created it.

• Howard Goldstein He is the vice-president of a company called the "Center for Digital Imaging, Inc. They are a museum consulting company essentially, that generally works on DAM systems for museums. He is very interested in open-source solutions and also in bringing together collections and DAM systems for museums. He was already aware and very interested in Fedora. He is pushing it for a system that they are doing with the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. He is very interested in getting involved with our community building activities.

• Arizona State University I have been in touch with Keith Kentigh at ASU after he asked some questions at my presentation at the Computer Aided Archeology conference recently. He is the PI of a Mellon grant to do systems stuff with archeological data, jointly with John Howard, as it happens. Apparently, they have already decided to use Fedora with their project. I offered to stop by on my way back from Santa Barbara in July to both talk archeology and visit with our long-time Fedora users at ASU in the library. There is the opportunity to try to pull together an archeology tool kit for fedora that builds both on their work and my work with the people in Athens.

March, 2009

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences I had another talk yesterday with two people from this group. They seem to have decided to use Fedora for their archive. They are doing what is essentially a very large still imaging project. They are archiving films from Hollywood as 54meg images of each frame of the film, if I understand correctly. They say that they have very large (300gig) files that they need to manage as well, but they sound like SIPs to me that probably should be deconstructed. I am going to follow up.

• Docuteam Tobias Wildi from this company talked to me at the EU users meeting in Feb. about a casual users group that was forming in Switzerland that he said included about 12 institutions. We are working on an event in November where I will go over and make a presentation. I don't know too much about Docuteam but will find out.

• The Digital Antiquity Initiative This is a Mellon-funded project centered at Arizona State that is building a repository-based service to manage archeology data generally, but starting with data from government highways projects. He was very interested in the approach that I took to the ASCSA data and, I'm told, they have already decided to use Fedora. I have offered to visit in conjunction with the ESIP conference. Note that John Howard is associated with this one.

• Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Ruth Duerr, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center contacted me after my webinar to ask if we could send one or more people to a conference that ESIP was having in Santa Barbara in July. They would like a presentation on Fedora and one on DuraSpace. This is a consortium of academic, government and business institutions who work with earth science data. Ruth is on the Datanet project, too.

• Slovak National Library - heard about this one from Tom Cramer. I got a contact for Jozef Dzivak but haven't written to him yet. Actually, they were already in out registry as a VITAL customer.

• William and Mary University - The head librarian was at talk I gave about digital scholarly communication and is interested in how DuraSpace may let them be players. Being a small university but with a pretty high rep she is worried that they are not providing the kinds of services that their research faculty and grad students might need. I have written offering to come for a visit.

• The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - they are using Fedora for a variety of documents and metadata. I am talking to them soon about hosting a meeting in Rome later this year or early next.

February, 2009

• The Goddard Library of NASA - they got in touch with me with some questions. I have followed up and will make a visit. They are in DC area.

• National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Adminsitration (US) - I visited them last spring and didn't expect them to make a decision so soon. I heard about this from the Goddard guy, after corroborated by Cathy Norton from Woods Hole library.

• Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory - they are using Fedora for data from a study on aging in species other than human. Cathy Norton told me about this one.

• Dharma Drum Buddhist College - They appear to have decided to use Fedora for a variety of projects including oral history archives, Buddhist text archives. They are also using Second Life for teaching on the web so there could be an interesting integration down the road. They have very strong ties to UVA.