The table of Fedora Leadership Group Nominees below will be used for the upcoming election. After nominations are verified with the nominee they will be added to this page along with the nominee's personal statement.
Bronze Members
| Name | Organization | Title/Role | Personal Statement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joanna DiPasquale | Vassar College Libraries | Head of Digital Scholarship and Technology Services | I have worked with Fedora since 2011, when I encouraged my institution, Vassar College Libraries, to adopt it as our repository platform. We have used Fedora in conjunction with Islandora as our object delivery system, and I have been the lead developer, application manager (with help from Discovery Garden), project manager, and more to ensure that objects are created, stored, and delivered to researchers in the Vassar community and beyond. As the Head of Digital Scholarship and Technology Services at Vassar, a small liberal arts college (LAC), I know well that the ability to leverage the flexibility and extensibilty of Fedora is paramount, as we work to ingest a variety of types of content generated from our ever-growing digital library and digital scholarship programs. However, it is also important that managing, growing, and taking advantage of new features of Fedora is possible for smaller organizations like mine. I work with many LAC partners through the Islandora Collaboration Group, and we feel keenly when system facets like migration paths, content modeling, or workflow procedures meet our more limited resources. I believe that I can effectively represent these interests in balance within the larger picture of making Fedora the most effective and durable repository system possible for libraries and other cultural heritage organizations. I would be honored to serve as part of the Fedora Leadership Group. |
Silver Members
| Name | Organization | Title/Role | Personal Statement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Awre | University of Hull | Head of Information Services | As a long-term adopter of Fedora (since 2005), and lead advocate for its use in the UK, I have championed the benefits of Fedora as a digital repository platform and supported those exploring its use for a variety of different purposes. I believe in the repository platform being considered as infrastructure rather than application, and seek to refresh how repositories are viewed institutionally to better establish them in this way. Fedora offers the only platform that enables this. I am also a founder member of the Hydra Project in 2008 and recognise the important link between Fedora and the services making use of it to exploit its capabilities as a key element of the future of Fedora. In continuing with a role on the Leadership Group I would look to better understand the specific needs of silver level supporters and represent these as part of the broad Fedora community of users. |
| Stefano Cossu | Art Institute of Chicago | Director of Application Services, Collections | |
| Andy Weidner | University of Houston Libraries | Metadata Services Coordinator | In my role as project manager for the Bayou City DAMS project, I am leading a multi-year, cross-departmental effort to implement a Fedora/Hydra repository for the University of Houston Libraries based on Hydra-in-a-Box (Hyku). As an active and founding member of the relatively new South Central States Fedora Users Group, I am excited about contributing to the Fedora community and championing its use in our region. If elected, I will work to represent the interests of new and potential Fedora adopters. |
Gold Members
| Name | Organization | Title/Role | Personal Statement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aaron Choate | University of Texas Libraries | Director of Digital Strategies | I have been involved in digital library / archives development in various ways for over 15 years. I have worked across many aspects of our operations; from development, to service provision, project management, and team leadership, and now as a director concentrating on our library’s digital strategies. I am interested in working to ensure that Fedora continues to perform as a core for a wide array of digital asset systems, supporting a strong ecosystem of complimentary interfaces and services. |
| Sayeed Choudhury | Johns Hopkins University | Associate Dean for Research Data Management | I have been an advocate for Fedora since its inception, most notably through a Mellon Foundation funded analysis of repositories that highlighted Fedora’s utility for supporting more complex use cases. The data management program I have led at Johns Hopkins has used Fedora as one of its key components. Most recently, through an IMLS grant, Johns Hopkins is leading the development of a set of extensions (“API-X”) that will further enhance Fedora’s utility as both institutional repository and data archive. For example, we are developing an API-X extension that would build IIIF support for Fedora repositories. From the beginning of our data management program at Johns Hopkins, I have planned our efforts around Fedora as a key, flexible component of an evolving infrastructure. I have served on several advisory boards including DuraSpace, NISO, ICPSR, DLF, NDSA and ESIP so I would bring experience regarding strategic and administrative aspects as well. Finally, I have established connections with potential international partners for the Fedora community. I welcome the opportunity to contribute but, perhaps as importantly, learn more directly from the Fedora community. |
| Dan Davis | Smithsonian Institution | Technical Manager | My introduction to Fedora was testing its applicability for NARA to the ERA. I liked it so much I moved to Ithaca to manage its development for a period at Cornell and was a committer on Fedora 3. I have been a part of Fedora for over 12 years now. I helped found Fedora Commons and later participated in its transition to DuraSpace. While continuing to work part-time for DuraSpace, I joined the Data Conservancy team lead by Sayeed Choudhury at JHU. My related projects include the IMLS "Policy-Driven Repository Interoperability", the Alfred P. Sloan "DuraCloud for Researchers", and the Mellon "Enterprise Service Bus". Currently, I am active with API-X and Islandora. In 2014, I joined Thorny Staples at the Smithsonian Institution to be the first technical manager for its Office of Research Information Services. I manage/develop the SIdora project (using Fedora, Islandora and ServiceMix/Camel) implementing an enterprise data management infrastructure that includes a 6000 core high performance computing facility supporting a wide range of research. I bring an enterprise viewpoint established in sixteen years with Boeing and NASA working on Space Shuttle and other payloads, launch vehicles, aircraft design and manufacturing, Iridium and the International Space Station. I followed this with a venture acting as lead software architect for AT&T Wireless infrastructure financials. I honed my experience at Harris Corporation working on many repository-related projects plus redesign work for the U.S. Air Traffic Control system. SIdora is in production seeks to tie research-related Smithsonian systems together. We have a long way to go. It is predicated on being an integral part of active research, collecting context information while the research is being performed not afterwards. As an intentional byproduct, this context information forms the basis for reuse, curation and preservation of the research (data and, aspirationally, repeatable processes). We have taken to heart Sayeed Choudhury's observation "Reuse is Preservation." Fedora is being used within "repository-enabled", hybrid, microservices-oriented architecture within our data center, linked to partners and the cloud – with an eye towards using linked data as a key enabler for practical integrations. Fedora 4 is still in our future but eagerly are planning for it. Our focus is not currently on archiving and preservation (though certainly that is a key part of the Smithsonian's mission) but we are working upstream of those processes. The Smithsonian is an ideal place to work out issues because we have every sort of use case one could want for forwarding systems incorporating Fedora. Plus we have the ability to take a long view and evolutionary approach. Though we have a public mission to "the increase and diffusion of knowledge," we have not been sufficiently active contributors to open source. We made our first contributions only recently with Trippi-SPARQL and improvements to Islandora modules. We recognize that this mission is intrinsically shared with many constituencies and success can only be achieved in a community. We want the Smithsonian to fully emerge a contributor to the Fedora community. Thorny Staples once represented the Smithsonian but has now retired. And I wish to be considered to continue and extend his efforts. |
| Philip Konomos | Arizona State University Library | Associate University Library and CTO | |
| Rosalyn Metz | Emory University Libraries | Director of Library Technology and Digital Strategies | I am the Director of Library Technology and Digital Strategies at Emory University in Atlanta. I lead a diverse cross-functional team at the university on a multi-year effort to implement a Fedora/Hydra based repository. Ultimately, we seek to preserve content for all of the libraries, archives, and museums on campus. I have been involved in digital repositories and digital preservation in various roles throughout my career -- in project, product, and service management, operations and infrastructure management, and through my work with DPN. Fedora's extensible architecture and support for linked data make it a key component of digital repositories and digital libraries. Therefore, I believe it is up to us, the cultural heritage institutions that support Fedora, to ensure its long-term stewardship and continued success well into the future. |
| Tom Murphy | University of Michigan - ICPSR | Director of Computing & Network Services | Mr. Murphy directs Computing and Network Services at ICPSR, and he manages software architecture, design, and planning. He is the author of ICPSR’s current technology roadmap and future directions. Mr. Murphy is also an enterprise architect/CTO and has spent much of the last 15 years re-architecting enterprise solutions to transition into scalable, integrated software architectures, with a focus on strong open source community projects. Mr. Murphy has substantial private business IT background in finance, manufacturing, health care, energy, commercial software and IT management consulting across the Fortune 500. Prior to ICPSR, he was most recently the Chief Technical Enterprise Architect for a $125B energy company and was responsible for integrating cloud services for enterprise content collaboration across 50,000 users and companies that did business with this entity. Mr. Murphy is a current member of the Fedora Leadership Group. He and his team have architected an Enterprise Platform around Fedora and other open source technologies to deliver the "Science of Data Science" to the research area of University of Michigan and their platform is under consideration currently by other large repositories and museums as well. |
| Tim Shearer | UNC Chapel Hill - University Libraries | Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies and IT | UNC Libraries have been using Fedora as the core technology in the Carolina Digital Repository since 2010. At UNC we are moving actively from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4, adopting PCDM as part of this move, and exploring Hyrax as the new front end to our institutional repository. In addition to being DuraSpace members, we have been engaged in the community and contributed developer time to Fedora 4. Carolina is poised to become a Hydra member in 2017. UNC's commitment to DuraSpace, Fedora, and the Hydra community will only grow with the relatively recent adoption of an Open Access policy for the campus. Tim Shearer is Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies and IT and is ultimately responsible for repository development at Carolina. |
