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 (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  (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.

February, 2010

• 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 (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.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.

January, 2010

• 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.

• Dale Peters Dale has left DRIVER and is now the Head of Academic Computing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. That is the place where she used to be and where the DISA project is set. I visited there last year. She wrote to me that she is very interested in continuing to promote Fedora and our other projects. If we need a DuraSpace point person in South Aftrica, she is definitely it.

December, 2009

• Bryan Beacher, ICPSR Bryan talked to me about participating in DuraCloud, which he has since applied to do. ICPSR is using Fedora. They are also looking for a new director, Myron Guttman left to go to NSF. Myron is a big fan of Fedora so we should keep him in mind.

• David Greenbaum, Berkeley and Bamboo Project David talked to me at CNI about Fedora in multiple contexts, including Bamboo. His group at Berkeley also supports various other large projects, including that of Eric Kansa, see below. I will be visiting them to continue both discussions in March in association with the west coast users meeting at Stanford.

• Susan Perry, Mellon Susan is a program officer for Mellon with her own area that seems to have to do with small liberal arts colleges. I met her through Joan Lippencott and she is an old bud of Karin's apparently. We talked at CNI about this conference that she is putting on in Budapest this summer for the American International Consortium of Academic Libraries, a group of libraries at 22 small American univerisities in Europe, Africa and Asia, with a strong middle eastern group apparently. I am going to particiapte in a workshop and give a conference talk about something to do with durability of scholarly projects in the humanities; they will pay.

• Lodewijk Bogaards, DANS Lodewijk is a bit of a loose canon but he does get things done and he now understands the way that the committers work. He has the potential to contribute in a big way. They have developed their own app for Fedora that is just about ready to come out. They also have some very interesting projects going on with Fedora. He hosted an afternoon with the DANS folks. There is strong interest in DuraCloud, but some distrust in the cloud more generally.

• Jane Chen, private consultant I met her at the DISH conference  in Rotterdam. She is a consultant in the museum and cultural heritage sector and she is involved with Howard Goldstein (he's active in Small Archives, see below) in setting up a non-profit operation that is interested in developing software for museums and archives. She is very sharp and is working with the folks at the Balboa Park museums on long-term strategy. Josh Greenberg introduced her to me.

• Andrew Treloar Andrew presented at the Oxford meeting on his current projects. He also said, quite clearly, that in his current role he has big bucks to give out (12 million Australian was the number that sticks) and he thought that Australia had taken quite liberally from the open-source world and it was time to give back. The only catch is he can only spend the money on Australians. He made it clear that he wanted to support what was going on at FIZ Karlsruhe and Fedora. I have approached him (January, 2010) about contributing to the core development, but have not heard back as he is on vacation for most of the month.

• Martin Dow When I was at the Oxford meeting I had a good talk with Martin. He has a potential client in a large business in the UK and wanted to get a feel for where DuraSpace was going so that he could best convince that client that the Fedora software has a stable long-term home. I think we were really more rehearsing him on things he already knew, but it was a good conversation. He was very enthusiastic about where we have been going and he particularly made a point of praising the Akubra work as spot on what was needed. I have passed that on to Chris.

November, 2009

• Rolf Brugger, SWITCH Rolf runs the learning objects repository at SWITCH which is a national higher-ed consortium for Switzerland. They are long-time Fedora users who participate on mailing lists, etc. He pulled together the large group of Fedora users that I first started discussing with Tobias Wildi (see March 2009, Docuteam) last spring. I discussed starting up a users group for Switzerland with him and there was interest. It is relatively easy for everyone to get together for a one-day meeting and get home in the evening. Don't know if there is any direct possiblities for DuraCloud here, but he is very well connected nationwide, so could help point to possibilities.

• Eric Kansa, School of Information at Berkeley Eric is the director of a program that collects lots of data from small archaeological projects for long-term sustaining; very oriented to getting the stuff out in a sustainable way, not a dark archive. He collects lots of FileMaker, Access, etc. databases and converts them to a data model that is very Fedora-ready. He is potentially a very good possibility for DuraCloud too. I think he has strong ties to Cliff Lynch.

• Ortwin Dally, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Ortwin is with the DAI in Berlin. The are the national organization that funds the various schools that Germany runs around the world. (The American School is the only one not funded by the government of the 10 or so in Athens.) This was the first meeting of the German and American School to look into cooperating and collaborating. The DAI is very interested in Fedora. I am trying to work out a visit to them in Berlin in the spring. Can't get them to pay travel but they will pick up local expenses. I don't think that there is much possibility for the DuraCloud service here but they could an interesting use case for the software in-house.

• Jack Davis, American School for Classical Studies at Athens Jack is the Director of the School in Athens. He is a very computer savvy archaeologist. The American School has ambitious plans for digital libraries, but very limited IT resources. The organization is a private consortium of American universities, with a very large managing board made up of faculty from the universities. The are VERY shy of adding any positions for IT. The School is the repository for several major and many minor digs in Greece (with increasing large collections of born-digital), they have two libraries with significant rare materials, and a large archive that incudes both the school and what is seen to be the Greek national archive for papers of famous people. They are a good possibility for Fedora in the longer run. This meeting was a joint meeting with the German School in Athens to begin to look into possible joint solutions to durable information systems. It seems to me that the School is a potential DuraCloud customer, possibly sooner if it were just for replication of stuff in Greece at locations in North America. It will require some education/outreach to board members who are here in the States.

October, 2009

• Lee Namba, ATOS Origin I met Lee when I was consulting with ATOS for the BNF project.He has now moved to running a programming group that works with Roger's area. We are planning a talk with him and whoever he brings next week to go over the OSGi stuff (Eddie and Chris will do a briefing0 but also to talk about what they can do on the next two releases to keep Eddie and Chris free to continue concentrating on OSGi. Chris and I agree that we will position this like we would with anyone else proving themselves to be committers: doing good work to establish the trust, then bring someone in from ATOS as a committer.

• Derek Keats, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg I met Derek at Pasig. He recently moved from a U. in Capetown to Joburg. His presentation was about the "design of a private cloud in relation to creating synergy among various IT initiatives in order to deliver a cutting-edge archiving infrastructure based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)." He is very interested in small archives generally. He talked to me about getting some Fedora training going in South Africa, which I have also been talking about with Pat Liebetrau at the DISA project in Durban. He says that he can get the money to put it together and bring people over. I am trying to get them together on it.

• Rachel Frick, IMLS Rachel is a senior program officer at IMLS who was at the PASIG. I met her years ago when she was with the digital library program at the University of Richmond. I went down there to give a talk. She says that IMLS is very interested in the whole subject of small archives and she is interested in our solution community effort. I have offered to come to DC and do a session on Fedora for the IMLS program officers like the one I did for NEH last year.

• Karim Boughida, George Washington University Karim is in the library at GW heading up their digital initiatives effort. He used to be at the Getty Research Institute. When he heard that I was till in Charlottesville, he said that he would like me to come talk to them about Fedora, etc. I told him that I would be happy to if he invited his friends. There is a consortium of private universities in the DC area that we haven't had much contact with that could be included, as well as other government and business types.

September, 2009

• Paolo Mangiafico, Duke University  I gave a general talk about Fedora, DuraSpace and DuraCloud to the "Triangle Research Libraries Network" which includes UNC, NC State, Duke and North Carolina Central. David Kennedy from Duke set it up but this guy is his boss. They have been using  Fedora at Duke's main library for a little while now. David was hired from Maryland where he was involved in significant projects. It seems like there is the chance to both set up a TRLN users group and also to possiblity get some collaborative development going. Paolo seems particularly interested in the community development aspects.

August, 2009

• Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society  This guy skyped me from his summer home in Novosibirsk, Russia yesterday. Apparently he is the founder of the Open Library Society, Inc. a private non-profit group that does digital library stuff. He is preparing a course on digital libraries that he wants to teach at Long Island U. in the fall and wanted to include Fedora. I sent him two of my slide sets. I'm not sure whether he is a wacko or not, but he agreed to make his materials available.

• DC Area Users Group  This was a joint meeting of the DC Code4Lib and the new Fedora users group. A very good meeting for which Fedora was the theme. Andrew and I did a Fedora update, and a DuraSpace DuraCloud presention. Andrew also showed the new test repository instance that he has running in the cloud. We don't have any objects in it yet, but there was real interest in having access to it. Several people there were saying that they would really find it useful to be able to use such an instance of Fedora with some persistent storage. The example that really resonated was to get a test intance of the repository that they would like to have up so that they could work on it for a while and do presentations of a design, etc. There was clearly an interest in paying for such a service. There is also strong interest in DuraCloud. Apparently, this new CTO in the Obama adminstration is pushing the Cloud in a big way. People there were from NLM, NOAA, Ag. Library, Goddard and the CIA. A guy from the CIO of NOAA's office was there, named Richard Schneider, and he was very interested in all of this. Andrew and I had lunch with him.

• Loren Sherbak, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian  I didi a presentation for serveral departments at the Smithsonian, hosted by the archives. I did my content modeling presentation as  followup to two others that I have done over the last two years. Loren was very interested in the possiblitiy of running a Fedora repository in DuraCloud. They have budget for such things but minimal IT support.

• George Van Dyke, Smithsonian  George and his new tech lead were both there. I'm not sure where George is attached in the SI exactly, but he is working on a big data curation project. He is very uncomfortable with all of the Cloud talk. They are looking for the right solution for the data archive and he has been sniffing around Fedora for a while. The time of my content modeling presentation was good for the tech lead. He has been playing around with Fedora for a little while now but the light bulb really hadn't gone on about what he could really do with it. His reaction to my presentation made it clear that the light bulb is now burning brightly.

July, 2009

• Arizona State University Library ASU has been one of our longest running users but I really didn't know how they were using Fedora so this was interesting. They don't do any digitizing of their own collections, they work with faculty projects. They have worked on a variety of things, science and humanities, including a big GIS centered project. I don't know what will happen when John leaves. One strong interest that we talked about is in creating an XML editing service that create and manage XML datastreams for a variety of metadata standards. Also, one of their programmers made the point that DSpace's developer community was largely built by developers who were interested in the top of the stack, the user interface related stuff, which Fedora doesn't have. I think that maybe we could use the SWAT team idea to organize developers for Fedora around higher level apps and utilities (like the XML thing) that would feed more developers into the community. Some of them might become interested in on the core.

• Keith Kintigh, ASU and Archeoinformatics I spent the afternoon with Keith and his crew, which includes library folks; this is one of those faculty projects. They had been moving towards using a relational database for their persistent store and using Fedora for something else that wasn't quite clear. It seemed as if they wanted to use Fedora but weren't sure why. I think that I helped them understand that an XML-based approach would be better for durability, then they could extract any number of SQL databases from that data for analysis.

• John Howard, ASU now, moving to be head librarian at City U. Dublin John did accept the head librarian job in Dublin. They are very much already a Fedora shop there, and John is one of our biggest supporters; he will be a head librarian who had done serious programming, recently even. I asked him to make an effort to help Susan Schreibman out at the Digital Humanities Observatory project in Ireland and I had already introduced him to Don Gouley, my old friend who works for her. He has done a lot of work with faculty projects and Fedora in a library setting. Note that John was at Harvard before ASU and has roots with Dale Flecker and Mackenzie Smith.

• Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Conference I was asked to give a presentation at this meeting by Ruth Duerr, after she attended the webinar that I did. She coordinates a preservation and archiving track for the group and I led off that track in the conference. This community is not so aware of repository issues, much more grid oriented, but they are getting into OAIS thinking in a big way. There definitely is the beginning of an awareness that repositories are a different way to think about things.

• Bob Downs, The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia U. Chatted with Bob about Fedora and introduced him to the concept of scholars workbenches. They use VITAL and he was really going on about the problems of taking in stuff that had already been done. A nice guy and one of our long-running users/

• Steve Morris, North Carolina State University Library Steve is leading an effort to create a GIS archive for the state of North Carolina that is local government-oriented rather than academic. They are considering using Fedora for this. I offered to come down and talk to them if they got interested.

• Bruce Wilson, Oak Ridge National Laboratories Bruce works at Oak Ridge but also has an appointment in the School of Information at U. of Tenn. He is also the Co-PI of the other Datanet project, DataONE. He is also the boss of Jerry Pan who we did a letter of support for. He is very interested in Fedora for a variety of things. I offered to come see them too, if I could hit both Oak Ridge and U. Tenn.

• Kenneth Casey, National Oceanographic Data Center (NOAA) When I went to talk to NOAA with the guy from Sun, we talked to a group of IT contractors that work for NOAA. Kenneth actually works for the group at NOAA who is charged with doing the data archiving. He was both unaware of the IT group meeting and pretty much of Fedora in general. He was very interested. I offered to come back for another visit with other people that he would put together but he said he needed to build up the idea around there. I will definitely be following up.

June, 2009

• DL.ORG Working Group meeting This was quite an experience, that is for sure! Their (the Italians who run the show; 3 of the committee are all from the CNR) idea of architecture and interoperability is all about making web services of all kinds work together, not about content interoperability. I did manage to get the to concentrate on working on the services that read from and write to repositories, I think. I really don't feel technically qualified to be in this effort, if this effort is really worth is at this time. We need to talk.

• Bram vander Werf, Europeanna Europeanna is a harvesting project that is creating OAI-based access to digital cultural resources across the EU. They are not really potential repository users, as they just aggregate and enhance metadata, which they give back to the content owners. Apparently, they are very much a power to be reckoned with when it comes to EU funding for cultural heritage projects. Bram is the technical director from the business world. More about him in the Rob Sanderson entry below.

• Rob Sanderson, U. of Liverpool now, moving to LANL Rob has been working on Cheshire at the U. of Liverpool for many years and has been involved with the ORE effort as well. I had never met Rob before, he is a great guy and lots of fun. He, Bram (above) and I were staying in the same hotel and had dinner and drinks togther each night. None of us could really figure out exactly what the group was about, and all agreed that the meeting was a surreal experience. I made a remark that what we really need for interoperability is a global system of persistent identifiers for digital objects that is as solid and boring as domain name addresses. Rob really got into the idea and seems to be running with it. Bram also offered resources to get involved and we talked about what organizations is would take around the world to get involved. This really began as a conversation over drinks but could turn itno something. For the record, Rob is going to work at LANL for Herbert in August and will be dropping off the working group.

• Katherine Kott I think that we may have Katherine Kott's participation in the Scholars Workbench community. She would be perfect. I still need to find out if Tom Cramer will see that she has time for it; they have had serious layoffs at Stanford. I'm working on it.

• 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.