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We skipped over February because the weather was abysmal. But with longer days and sunshine ahead, we are moving right into March! This also gives us an opportunity to share
even more exciting news from the Fedora Community. Read on to find out what’s been going on.
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Fedora 7.0.0-beta1 Released
Early this month, the Fedora team announced the release of
fcrepo-7.0.0-beta1. With this release, we are now looking for your help with community testing. If you missed the official announcement, read it on the
Fedora
blog.
Download and Test fcrepo-7.0.0-beta1 via
GitHub or
Docker.
Fedora 7.x represents a major modernization of the Fedora application. Through the
Dependency
Upgrade Project, the Fedora codebase has been updated to the latest versions of Java, Spring, Maven, Jersey, and other key libraries. We have also expanded automated
test coverage to ensure smoother upgrades in the future, improved stability, and easier community contributions. Several other fixes and improvements that have been folded into the codebase through recent work and are now rolled into the fcrepo-7.0.0-beta1
release.
Community Testing
We need you! We are looking to our users to engage in Community Testing to ensure that Fedora 7.x is meeting user expectations and operating as expected. Real-world testing
feedback will help inform any optimization and tuning required prior to Production Release.
How to participate
With fcrepo-7.0.0-beta1 we have also released a new set of
Community
Release Testing Procedures.
Review
specific instructions related to this release.
All feedback is being directed to a
release-specific
GitHub discussion.
Your participation directly contributes to the stability, security, and reliability of Fedora. Thank you to everyone able to test and share feedback.
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Fedora Camp is back this September. Join us September 2-4 in Vienna for 3 days of in-person collaboration, learning and networking with Fedora community members from around the
world! More details coming soon.
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Fedora Partners with Black Lunch Table
Black
Lunch Table (BLT)
is a nonprofit arts and digital humanities initiative founded by artists
Heather Hart and jina valentine. The organization brings together artists, scholars, and community members through roundtable discussions, oral histories, and collaborative projects that document and elevate the work and experiences of Black artists.
Through these conversations and community-driven efforts like collaborative public programs and initiatives like Wikipedia edit-a-thons, BLT is building a growing digital archive that helps address long-standing gaps in how Black cultural contributions are
documented and preserved.
In late December 2025, BLT partnered with the Fedora Program Team to begin a new project that brings the BLT Archive together with the Fedora repository platform. As part of
this collaboration, Dan Field, Fedora Program Developer, will deploy a Fedora-based preservation system to support the long-term preservation of BLT’s digital archive. Working closely with
keondra bills freemyn, Co-Executive Director, Archives + Strategy, Dan will migrate the organization’s existing archival records into this new Fedora repository.
We are grateful to keondra and the entire BLT team for the opportunity to collaborate on this project. We look forward to sharing updates with the community as the work progresses.
In the meantime, you can learn more about their work by visiting the
Black
Lunch Table Archive.
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Cross-Community Involvement
Islandora/Fedora Discovery Calls
Join us on
Thursday, March 26 at 10 a.m. ET for a new monthly session we are holding for Islandora and Fedora users. These informal meetings provide space for users from both of our communities to come together to discuss challenges, development progress and ultimately
find avenues for support specific to Islandora/Fedora users.
During our kick-off meeting last month, attendees shared how they currently use Islandora with Fedora. The conversation explored how Islandora writes content to Fedora through
components like the Flysystem adapter and the Milliner microservice, highlighting some of the technical constraints and potential performance issues. A key focus was how Fedora can better serve as the system of record, particularly in the case of disaster
recovery scenarios.
For more information on how to participate, please see the
Fedora
wiki.
EU/UK Tech Meeting
Join us on the
second Tuesday of each month at 13:00 UTC for the EU/UK Tech Meeting. Not just for Fedora users from the EU or UK, this monthly meeting serves to supplement the regular weekly Tech Meeting in a time zone more friendly to those outside of North America.
Anyone is welcome to join. All meeting notes and details on how to participate can be found on the
Fedora
wiki.
Our next meeting is scheduled for:
Tuesday, April 14 at 13:00 UTC. See you there!
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