Leads on New Fedora Community Members

May, 2009

• 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 am having conversations with both of them before vacation.

• 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.