Fedora Newsletter, May 2018
David Wilcox
Call for Action
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.
Membership
Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of DuraSpace members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. We have begun our annual membership campaign with a goal of raising $570,000. This funding pays for full time staff to work on the project 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!
Annual Report
We are pleased to announce that the 2017 Fedora Annual Report is now available. This report was approved by the Fedora Leadership Group at the end of April. A PDF of the report can be downloaded from the Fedora wiki.
We encourage you to share this report with colleagues and anyone else who might be interested.
DuraSpace and the Islandora Foundation
DuraSpace is pleased to announce a new formal working relationship with the Islandora Foundation, a Canadian non-profit that fosters the Islandora repository community and codebase. More than two hundred repositories worldwide are built on Islandora, a popular digital asset management platform using Fedora as a back-end repository. The relationship between DuraSpace and the Islandora Foundation will be strengthened by the Foundation’s new bronze-level membership with DuraSpace.
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The Candidate Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still available for public review.
As described in the charter, this specification is designed to:
- Define the characteristics and expectations of how clients interact with Fedora implementations
- Define such interactions such that an implementation’s conformance is testable
- Enable interoperability by striving to minimize the need for modifications to client applications in order to work with different implementations of the Fedora API specification
The core HTTP and notification services defined in this specification are listed below, along with the associated standards from which they are derived:
- Resource Management (Linked Data Platform)
- Resource Versioning (Memento)
- Resource Authorization (Web Access Controls)
- Notifications (Activity Streams)
- Extended Binary Resource Operations
- Fixity (HTTP headers)
The public comment period for the Candidate Recommendation will remain open until the Spring, after which we are targeting the release of the full Recommendation. Minimum requirements for transitioning to releasing the Recommendation include:
- Specification compliance test suite
- Two or more implementations of the specification
- No unresolved, outstanding critical issues, as defined by the specification editors
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.
Community-driven Activity
Alignment with API Specification
As part of the completion of the Fedora API specification, the current implementation will need to be brought into alignment with the documented specification. To this end, we have completed two code sprints to further the alignment work. The first sprint ran from March 5 to March 16 and the second sprint started April 16th and ran through the 27th. This second sprint featured contributions from the following people and institutions:
- Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
- Ben Pennell, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Bethany Seeger, Amherst College
- Danny Bernstein, DuraSpace
- Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
- Joe Harrington, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Longshou Situ, University of California, San Diego
- Mohamed Abdul Rasheed, University of Maryland
- Peter Eichman, University of Maryland
- Randall Floyd, Indiana University
- Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech
In the course of the sprint we closed over thirty issues with eleven participants. We made major progress across four broad areas: Memento versioning, SOLID/WebAC, external content handling, and the compatibility test suite. More details below:
Significant work to overhaul the handling of binaries and their descriptions was completed in order to bring the implementation of the Memento API (i.e. versioning) right up to the finish line. In the course of implementing the SOLID/WAC specification (Web Access Control) during the previous sprint we discovered that it would be necessary to decouple access control from Modeshape in order to complete the implementation. During this past sprint the team completed the lion’s share of that work. By making this improvement now, we advanced both short and longer range goals. Namely, aligning the current Fedora implementation with the specification in the short term while simultaneously increasing the flexibility of the codebase by reducing dependencies on the data storage layer (Modeshape). In the interim between the first and second sprints, the spec editors introduced a substantial change to the handling of external content to the Fedora specification. The bulk of that work was completed during the sprint. Finally, the Compatibility Test Suite underwent a series of refactorings and improvements aimed at elevating the quality of codebase to align with other Fedora projects in order to facilitate contribution and increase maintainability.
Oxford Common File Layout
The third OCFL call took place on Friday, March 9. Notes, video, and audio are available online. This call featured updates on work in-progress from institutions working on OCFL-related efforts and a review of comments on the OCFL Discussion Paper. We are also collecting use cases in a GitHub repository. The next meeting will be on Friday, May 25th at 11am ET. Please join the ocfl-community mailing list for further updates.
Conferences and events
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!
Upcoming Events
DC Fedora User Group Meeting
The next DC Area Fedora User Group Meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 15 at the University of Maryland. The agenda will feature updates on DuraSpace, Fedora, and the recent API alignment sprints, as well as topics from members of the local user community. Please add your name to the event page on the wiki if you plan to attend.
IASSIST & CARTO
The annual IASSIST conference will be held in Montreal, QC on May 29 to June 1. This year’s conference brings together members of IASSIST and ACMLA-ACACC (CARTO), expanding the scope of the conference programme to include data specialists from a variety of fields and workplaces. The program features a workshop and presentation on Fedora by Product Manager David Wilcox. Please register in advance to attend.
Open Repositories
The annual Open Repositories conference will take place June 4-7 in Bozeman, Montana. The conference brings together users and developers of open digital repository platforms from higher education, government, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. The program features a variety of workshops and presentations on Fedora-related topics. Please register in advance to attend.
Islandora Camp EU
June 20 - 22, 2018, Islandora Camp's regular visit to the EU will bring it to Limerick, Ireland, at the beautiful (and newly updated) library of the University of Limerick. Please register in advance to attend.
Islandora Camp HRM
Islandora Camp is coming to Atlantic Canada! July 18 - 20, 2018, we will be gathering in historic Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the campus of Mount Saint Vincent University. Come for the islandora, stay for the food, history, and gorgeous waterfront. Please register in advance to attend.
Previous Events
DuraSpace Summit
The DuraSpace Member Summit was held April 10-11 prior to the CNI Spring Member Meeting in San Diego. Slides of select presentations are available here. CEO Debra Hanken Kurtz was pleased to report that DuraSpace had its "Best. Year. Ever." in 2017. The facts, figures, and narrative underscore the fact that DuraSpace is a sound investment in the scholarly ecosystem just in time for the launch of our 2018 Membership Campaign.
CNI
The CNI Spring Meeting took place April 12-13 in San Diego, CA. Representatives from CNI member organizations gather twice annually to explore new technologies, content, and applications, to further collaboration, to analyze technology policy issues, and to catalyze the development and deployment of new projects. The program included an update on the Fedora vision, strategy, and roadmap from David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, and Robin Ruggaber, University of Virginia.
ILIDE
The Innovative Library in Digital Era conference, which took place April 15-18 in Jasna, Slovakia, presented visionary and original ideas based on the extensive experience of the participating experts and institutions. This year's program included an update on current Fedora developments and future plans from Neil Jefferies, University of Oxford.
Digital Initiatives Symposium
Danny Bernstein (DuraSpace Tech Lead) attended the Digital Initiatives Symposium on April 23-24 at the University of California, San Diego. He noted the high level of interest expressed by attendees in Kathleen Shearer’s keynote on COAR’s vision of an open scholarly ecosystem as an alternative to the system currently monopolized by the five largest scholarly publishers. Some of the other themes that emerged from the event included data integration (ORCID, Omega), data migration (from CONTENTdm into Islandora), and the value, mechanics, and promise of the Linked Data Platform (LDP).
Southern Miss IR Conference
The Southern Miss IR Conference took place April 26-27 at the University of Southern Mississippi. It provided an opportunity for Institutional Repository (IR) managers to come together and learn about new ideas and strategies that their colleagues are using at their institution to meet the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. The conference included a Fedora demo and a presentation on selecting an open source IR platform by Fedora Product Manager David Wilcox.