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A Walk Along the Fedora Commons Carol Minton Morris Communications and Media Director

A Walk Along the Fedora Commons Carol Minton Morris Communications and Media Director Fedora Commons Cornell University Ithaca, New York. • Setting the stage for Fedora Commons: Scholars of the future • A few facts about why 12,000 users and ‘swampworks’ testers downloaded Fedora in

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A Walk Along the Fedora Commons Carol Minton Morris Communications and Media Director

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  1. A Walk Along the Fedora Commons Carol Minton Morris Communications and Media Director Fedora Commons Cornell University Ithaca, New York

  2. • Setting the stage for Fedora Commons: Scholars of the future • A few facts about why 12,000 users and ‘swampworks’ testers downloaded Fedora in the last 6 months • The community, ten Fedora Commons partners and ten reasons why • Towards a solution-bundle future • Questions

  3. A look back • Fedora Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture

  4. A look back • A Cornell University research project, 1997-2002 DARPA and NSF-funded research and reference implementations Distributed, interoperable repositories (experiments with CNRI) • Open Source development project, 2002-2007 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2002-2009 Joint development by Cornell University and University of Virginia • Fedora Commons non-profit organization, summer2007 New grant from Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, 4.9M over four years

  5. Fedora Commons is the home of Fedora software, an open access template for technologies at the forefront of global change in social and scholarly communications as an information layer over durable resources.

  6. “At present, scholarship is largely the domain of professional specialists, most of whom work as academics in universities, research institutes, and museums.” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_method>

  7. Let’s look at who the scholars of the future are, right now.

  8. Future scholars exist in a world of rich collaboration on and offline that extends far beyond the borders of formal education. Working together is the the best way they know to get answers in any context.

  9. Interacting in many situations, with different forms of entertainment, communications, and consumer web sites while using multiple technologies is just another day in the life of future scholars.

  10. Networked multiplayer online game environments and virtual worlds will evolve into new spaces for scholarship taking scholars of the future along for a ride to new paradigms for creating knowledge.

  11. Fedora, the flexible, extensible, digital object repository architecture, enables the creation of durable, reusable and independent resources for a new kind of scholar who does not yet know how they will be used to create warranted knowledge in the future.

  12. • Setting the stage for Fedora Commons: Scholars of the future • A few facts about why 12,000 users and ‘swampworks’ testers downloaded Fedora in the last 6 months • The community, ten Fedora Commons partners and ten reasons why • Towards a solution-bundle future • Questions

  13. “Fedora Commons provides sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage by bringing communities of practice together with software developers.” <http://http://www.fedora-commons.org/>

  14. Target Use Cases • Digital libraries and knowledge spaces Some idea of contextual content that is about and related to a body of resources, and that adds meaning and value to those aggregated resources.

  15. Target Use Cases • New models of publication Using a related aggregation of various types of content and context to create warranted knowledge

  16. Integrated information networks

  17. Fedora Commons is at the intersection of key social and technical trends: Open Scholarly Contexts Technical Contexts scholarly publication service-oriented e-scholarship web 2.0 collaborative digital library semantic web e-science web 3.0 museums

  18. Technology goals in support of key social and technical trends 1. Support the creation and publication of new forms of “information units” (e.g., compound entities; data and publications) 2. Knowledge integration: capturing semantic and factual relationships among information entities 3. Promote information re-use and contextualization 4. Accommodate information that is created as a byproduct of collaborative activity 5. Integrate with institutional and enterprise systems that Support research, collaboration, and scholarly communication (e.g., workflow) 6. Enable preservation and archiving of digital materials to ensure Sustainability and durability of digital information resources.

  19. • Setting the stage for Fedora Commons: Scholars of the future • A few facts about why 12,000 users and ‘swampworks’ testers downloaded Fedora in the last 6 months • The community, ten Fedora Commons partners and ten reasons why • Towards a solution-bundle future • Questions

  20. The Fedora Commons community consists of: Consortia Corporations Government Agencies Medical Centers National Libraries and Archives Professional Societies Publishers Research Groups and Projects Virtual Library Projects University IT Departments University Libraries and Archives

  21. In 2006 the Fedora Outreach Group conducted a survey to find out more about the community • Target group: 45 known Fedora projects • Timeframe: August - November 2006 • 30% response rate • Additional data from the 2005 User Survey was used as background for analysis

  22. Highlights Q: Why did you chose Fedora? • Flexible, extensible, open • An architecture to build on • Institutional and consortium need to work with open source software • Peer development opportunities • Service-based architecture • Technical evaluation of appropriateness for research repositories

  23. Highlights Q: Were there economic advantages to your project/org. in selecting Fedora? The majority of respondents liked working with Open Source software, but saving money was not the prime motivator in deciding to use Fedora. This is particularly true for large national projects and consortia who are more interested in “freedom and autonomy” and building out systems to meet specific requirements. “Fedora is future proof.”

  24. Store whatever you want. From journal articles, images, data sets, learning objects, and any combination of part of piece of the above, The Arrow Project is using Fedora to establish a repository to meet the Australian Government’s need to track research output from its universities now and into the future.

  25. “It (Fedora) was chosen as it offered in our view the most flexible, extensible structure in which to manage a wide variety of digital objects, with proven scalability and support for the OAI-PMH protocol.”

  26. 2. Easy Access Fedora enables you to flexibly access your content (or just parts of it) so you and your collaborators can easily use, fuse mash-up,and repurpose it in new and innovative ways. Like many other Fedora projects a key aspect of The University of Virginia Library’s goal was to ensure that their digital collections would be preserved and available to scholars, perhaps In novel ways, into the future.

  27. “Fedora was chosen because it was architected to facilitate handling of complex objects.”

  28. 3. Express Relationships The connections between content items can be captured and stored in Fedora as semantic relationships describing both the linkage and its meaning. The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Is using Fedora to create a semantic educational layer on top of over 2.5 M objects in the repository.

  29. NSDL made the decision to build a Fedora-based technical platform to enable user participation and collaboration across over 200 partner digital libraries and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics discipline communities in support of NSDL’s educational mission.

  30. Executive Director Kaye Howe explained the evolving semantic digital library and her willingness to “risk” the investment of resources this way during her plenary address to Fedora users at the 2007 Open Repositories Conference: “The clarity of metadata did not reflect the richness of intellectual inquiry.” In Howe’s view context and relativism are more important in pursuit of scholarship and do not diminish the fundamental nature of the intellectual enterprise. She sees Fedora as being analogous to the complexity of our collective intellectual enterprise, and at the center of intellectual empowerment in ‘NSDL 2.0.’”

  31. 4. Free open source software Most projects implement Fedora for other reasons, However CARL, The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries looked for and found a service-oriented architecture that was also an open source product with an active community in Fedora.

  32. “We are paying to have more staff to do a Fedora implementation rather than paying for software licensing fees. We also knew that we would have new libraries and new museums joining our consortium (currently 11 partners). As they join we want to be able to add them easily.”

  33. 5. Enables Permanence Institutions such as the National Library of Wales have at the heart of their mission a critical need to preserve language and cultural heritage. Other Fedora projects such as Forced Migration Online (FMO), a digital repository of scholarly resources based at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, provide services for users who count on the information being available when they need it. For projects like these permanence, durability, flexibility of Fedora digital objects is as important as preserving physical objects in buildings.

  34. 6. A supportive community The fact that you can get and answer on the fedora users list almost anytime, in any time zone, is a tribute to the community and a reason why small projects like Rhodes College were able to effectively use Fedora in day-to-day production.

  35. “Fedora is Rhodes College's office, production digital repository system. It is currently being used to store and describe digital objects that are part of the Crossroads to Freedom project, which is a special initiative overseen by Rhodes that links a digital archive of Civil Rights materials from Memphis to community engagement and education.”

  36. 7. Extensibility Large and significant collections of rich media--images, video, mutlimedia are often housed in legacy systems that are difficult to manage and access. The Sloan Kettering Surgery Department plans to migrate their collections of rich media to a Fedora repository to provide doctors and patients better access to critical care data by utilizing Fedora’s extensible data model.

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