Time/Place

Time: 10:00am Eastern Time (US)

Please see the calendar invite for the Zoom link.

Attendees

1. Laurie Arp 
2. Chris Awre 
3. Thomas Bernhart
4. Danny Bernstein 
5. Robert Cartolano 
6. Dan Coughlin
7. Jon Dunn  apologies
8. Dan Field
9. Raman Ganguly
10. Jennifer Gilbert
11. Emily Gore
12. Arran Griffith
13. Mark Jordan
14. Danny Lamb
15. Rosalyn Metz 
16. Robert Miller
17. Este Pope 
18. Scott Prater
19. Robin Ruggaber 
20. Oliver Schöner
21. Tim Shearer
22. Dustin Slater 
23. Jennifer Vinopal 
24. Ben Wallberg
25. David Wilcox
26. Maurice York

Agenda

Previous Action Items

Notes

Exercise 1: Jamboard Exercise Notes - https://drive.google.com/file/d/199n0OvdLLueZD_pFni8qKY-bXArSewGP/view?usp=sharing

Group 1

Question 1: What communities/groups of people that use Fedora

• Media Groups. How do they manage their digital content?
• This is a potentially untapped market and we don’t really know what these people are doing with their stuff?

Question 2: Missing Voices

• Engaging non-technical voices can feel difficult at times because of the nature of what we do/make
• Discussions do end up being mostly technical in nature
• Going back to previous list things like Media group, we don’t know who those people are either
• Researchers, faculty and grad students
• Interesting to put them on the list of missed voices because we often just assume they’re not interetsed

Question 3: What outlets can we use to connect?

• Looking at ways to get in to other people’s spaces instead of expecting them to come to us
• They may not be aware of why they need to be coming to us
• Survey fatigue 

Group 2

Question 1: What communities/groups of people that use Fedora

• Question to consider: If Fedora went away tomorrow, who would notice?

Question 2: Missing Voices

• Lack of understanding from those who don’t work directly from it so trying to make it understandable to them is challenging
• People understand physical objects (ie. a building) and they don’t understand software 
• Pandemic has potentially opened people’s eyes to the need to for things to go online
• Campus and library leadership is sometimes a hard sell on understanding because they don’t understand the need for what we do

Sensemaking Draft Slides.

Fedora 6.0 - Release Candidate out now!

• Many great improvements and optimization accomplished since Beta
• 31 tickets completed in last few weeks
• Testing done for performance
• We know it can support 10s of millions of items ++
• Core fedora - we feel really good about it
• On track to deliver before end of fiscal year
• Migration tooling - more or less complete
• No open issues for migration-utils for 3.x to 6
• Migration validation tool - WIP, but mostly complete
• Last remaining piece is Camel toolbox
• Not much left to do

Quarterly Financial Report Update - as of 3/31/21

Financial Update from David
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I17i-f_P6Y8rc7V3bOUpWtFdAp2N4LQA/view

Membership Dues - budget for $376K and raised $340K so it's a little less but overall pretty good.
This shortage is offset a bit by salary savings, which is temporary but puts the current budget in good space combined with extra money from lack of travel.

As of this report we are a little less than $50K in operational income, largely because of the grant and help in paying salary for David. This and next year's budget looking good, again largely because of grant. After next year, the grant is complete and we will need to offset expenses or raise more funds.

Gathering Fedora User Stories

Last Year Etse and Rosalyn met with Fedora members that had not be able to attend a virtual gathering. Most recent exercise made it seems like this has been a productive experience and potentially continue

What are three things that are going well in your repository program?

• backend infrastructure

• API that can leverage integration with other systems

• tightly integrated product owner with the development team

• Repository Manager position

• Discuss problems without jumping directly to solution

• Fedora is part of the core infrastructure and it's working

• Currently building out a tool to build out archival materials in ways that Fedora and DSpace do not for users outside of the archival users.

• Fedora is a tool that's being used to feed into other systems the way we want

• doesn't need to be the repository, we can build any front end we need for users based on needs

• Migration works well, but also a challenge and something that needs to be tackled in the next 3 years (this fits all categories)

What are three current challenges/concerns with your repository program?

• Challenge with migrating data

• Showcase was fedora (and even Samvera) can provide and getting institutional buy in and convincing colleagues on direction to take. Having something to show people is very helpful.

• Having to support multiple systems

• Successful with Fedora as a digital library collections, but in transition with research data and research transformation life cycle. Where should the libraries be preserving federally funded research data?

• Lack of resources throughout the library, understaffed for mission and ambition.

• don't have people and process in place to do the full preservation that we would prefer.

What are the three things you are hoping to tackle in the next 12-24 months?

• Sustainability of our digital repository program, focus on getting more stuff online

• Right size our repository program

• Looking for opportunities to do something better, making a framework to make better decisions on direction moving forward.

• Interest from others on any decision and prioritization frameworks

• onboarding new people

• developing a new team for working on a number of systems

• integrating with other systems to improve open access

• Gone through a RFP process to move to a hosted Samvera environment away from locally Islandora environment and Digital Commons.

• not enough local resources to manage

• looking at vendors as partners

• Migrating to Fedora 6

• Rethinking current staffing models based on new responsibilities with initiatives that are happening

Common Themes
System Integration
Fedora sharing information up and down the stack
Finding ways to segment our content/data

Potential Areas
Affordances of large and federal datasets may be different - do we need to keep everything forever
Keeping things releasable and in the cloud

Discussion at the end on several people wanting to get members from Islandora and Samvera community together for a discussion, not technical, in nature.

Action Items