This is the February 2019 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.
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.
With the 5.0 release behind us, we are pushing forward with a couple of exciting initiatives. With an eye towards our next major release, we have scheduled a three day, face-to-face design meeting with the committers in Virginia Beach at the end of February. On the more immediate front we are also focused in part on evolving the ecosystem tools that support integration with the new release of Fedora.
We have built-up excellent momentum on this front. So far the Fedora Java Client has been released (thank you Ben Pennell and UNC Chapel Hill). The Fedora Camel Toolbox and related projects are have been updated, are currently being tested by community members, and would expect a release in the next couple of weeks (thank you Aaron Birkland/JHU and Peter Eichmain/UMD). This cluster of ecosystem tools represents the lowest hanging fruit.
Next on the list is the necessity of bringing the import/export tooling into alignment with 5.0 and providing migration tooling for upgrading from a version 4.x to 5.x repository. Getting there will require some dedicated effort, most likely in the form of a sprint. Would you and/or your institution be willing to commit some time toward realizing these goals? We will need developers as well as testers to enable us to make the promise of the import, export and migration tooling a reality for Fedora 5.0. Please contact Fedora Tech Leads Danny Bernstein or Andrew Woods to get involved.
Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of DuraSpace members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. We will be kicking off this year's membership campaign with 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!
We would like to welcome the Berlin State Library as our newest Bronze member! The Berlin State Library is active in both the Fedora and Samvera communities; they hosted a Fedora and Samvera Camp in 2018 and they have sent representatives to regional German-Speaking Fedora User Group meetings.
You are invited to join experienced trainers at Fedora Camp to be held May 20-22 at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Fedora Camp, hosted by Emory University Libraries, offers everyone a chance to dive in and learn all about Fedora. Training will begin with the basics and build toward more advanced concepts–no prior Fedora experience is required. Participants can expect to come away with a deep dive Fedora learning experience coupled with multiple opportunities for applying hands-on techniques working with experienced trainers and Fedora gurus.
Previous Fedora Camps include the inaugural camp held at Duke University, the West Coast camp at CalTech, NYC camp at Columbia U, Texas camp at UT Austin, and NASA Camp at Goddard Space Flight Center. The camp curriculum will provide a comprehensive overview of Fedora by exploring such topics as:
The curriculum will be delivered by a knowledgeable team of instructors from the Fedora community including, David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager and Andrew Woods, Fedora Technical Lead.
View a sample agenda.
Register today and join us in Atlanta!
The Designing a Migration Path grant work continued in January with the second phase of the project. Tasks include profiling a number of Fedora 3.x repositories in order to determine commonalities and differences in terms of front-end application requirements and data modelling practices. The team will also review the current state of migration tooling and document the potential impact of the Fedora API specification and the Oxford Common File Layout on approaches to migration. Details will be made available on the wiki as these tasks are completed.
Keep an eye on this newsletter for monthly updates on our progress.
The Proposed Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still available for public review.
This release should be considered stable. No other updates are expected before the official 1.0 Recommendation.
Minimum requirements for releasing the 1.0 Recommendation include:
Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
This release contains two bug fixes and a dependency update. This release (being a "point" or "bug-fix" release) is backwards compatible with 5.0.0.
Download Fedora 5.0.1.
In tandem with the 5.0 release, we are reviewing and updating the project documentation. Creating and maintaining accurate and up-to-date documentation is equally as important as software development, so please contribute to this effort.
A 0.1 (Alpha) release of the OCFL spec was recently announced. You are invited to provide feedback, which will be discussed on future community calls.
The most recent OCFL call took place on Wednesday, January 9. Notes and audio are available online. This call included a review of the checklist required for Beta release and consideration of OCFL principles related to NDSA Levels of Preservation. The next community call takes place on Wednesday, February 13 at 11am ET. Please join the ocfl-community mailing list for further updates.
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!
The next South Central States Fedora User Group Meeting was held on January 16-17 at the University of Texas at Austin. The meeting included presentations on current implementations and work underway at peer institutions, discussion for users considering Fedora, and Fedora 5.0 updates and a workshop. Slides and other materials related to the presentations can be found on the event page.