The Sun StorageTek™ System with Fedora, also known as the Sun "Honeycomb," combines the Fedora Commons open source software platform with the Sun StorageTek™ 5800 System to provide a pedabyte-scale object store that greatly simplifies the task of preserving massive amounts of data over long periods of time. The Sun Solution Brief entitled, "A New Approach to Creating and Managing Large-scale Digital Archives" (pdf (175 KB)) provides an overview that explains:

• the integrated solution with proven success for large-scale repostiories at well known institutions
• how to link millions of digital objects in Fedora with capacity to seamlessly scale to hundreds of terabytes with the Sun StorageTek 5800™ System
• the high data integrity through automatic block and file level checksums and distribution of file fragments across nodes to ensure no sincle point of failure
• extreme data protection with redundant design that allows multiple nodes and drives to fail without any resultant data loss
• reduced cost and complexity of managing and administering digital archives

An emulator for the Sun StorageTek 5800™ is included in the StorageTek 5800 SDK 1.1, which is available at http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=465eed06.

The DRAMA team has announced the 1.2.1 release of Muradora which is now available for download at http://www.muradora.org/software. More information about Muradora (including deployment guides) can be found at http://www.muradora.org. DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) is a sub-project within RAMP that aims to develop a web front-end for Fedora repositories, and to re-factor Fedora authentication and authorization into pluggable middleware components. Please share your ideas and feedback with the developers.

Muradora is an easy to use repository application that supports federated identity (via Shibboleth authentication) and flexible authorization (using XACML). Muradora leverages Fedora's modularity, flexibility and scalability to form the core back-end repository, while different front-end applications (such as portlets or standalone web interfaces) can all talk to the same instance of Fedora, and yet maintain a consistent approach to access control.

Muradora and its related components are released under the Apache 2 license.

A major emphasis of Muradora 1.2.1 release was to fix bugs and to make several new features available:

• Better support for new XForms scripts for different metadata standards
• Preliminary support of Open Journal System (OJS) dissemination styles
• Support for IMS learning objects
• Automatic thumbnail generation for images
• New administration panel for administrators to assign access control to the repository
• Statistical view of accesses to resources

A running demo of Muradora can be found at http://demo.muradora.org. The DRAMA team has also made a Live DVD containing the complete installation of Muradora and its related components available. The Live DVD may be run directly from it without having to install Muradora on a hard disk. This DVD will be available for download within the next few days from the same address as above.

The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research coordinates scientific research in the Netherlands. Dutch science claims 2.6 percent of the global output of scientific publications where annual scientific research expenditures amount to approximately 9 billion euro.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is a forum, conscience, and voice for the arts and sciences in the Netherlands. The Academy promotes the quality of scientific and scholarly work and strives to ensure that Dutch scholars and scientists make the best possible contribution to the cultural, social, and economic development of Dutch society.

"DANS" is the Dutch national organization responsible for storing and providing permanent access to research data from both sources, humanities and social sciences. DANS is developing the Easy On Fedora (EOF) prototype using Fedora software. The aim of the EOF project is to establish an improved and easily expandable software infrastructure as the basis for many solutions.

DANS is currently gauging community interest in planning and participating in a Fedora Netherlands User Group Meeting to discuss how Fedora is being used there. Attendees will be encouraged to share their own experiences, and to learn from each other's Fedora efforts.

Easy On Fedora will be among the topics to be presented. The EOF prototype provides users with software as well as with the required infrastructure, in addition to a completely updated EASY web application that uses the infrastructure. Using standard solutions like Fedora to facilitate interoperability, EOF creates more structure at the data level with content models. The project aims to be future-oriented and "future-proof" as much as possible. EOF has done extensive research on the future of archiving in many fields and are anxious to share information with the Fedora community. If you are interested in participating please contact Lodewijk Bogaards. Date and location information will follow.

Florencio Almirol has an interest in how university news is managed and propagated. Almirol, a graduate student at California State University Los Angeles, heads up a student team that is prototyping the CoolStateLA Enterprise System. The project is led by Professor Jon Beaupre, Professor of Broadcast Journalism in the department of Communication Studies, and Professor Russ Abbott, computer science technical advisor. CoolStateLA is aimed at creating a "converged newsroom" that combines the ability to create, manage, review, and store content that will be simultaneously available to university media outlets - a newspaper; a web site; a blog facility; RSS news feed filter; text feeds to create email alerts; news webcasts; and Internet radio. CoolStateLA is a one-stop shop for getting the word out on campus and beyond. Almirol says, "Fedora's content model architecture coupled with versioning capabilities made it ideal for pulling in and pushing out different types of media."

The system combines a workflow application specifically purposed for communications activities in a typical university news bureau that includes roles for a programmer, news director, senior editor, assignment editor, reporter/producer, and correspondent. Joomla, an open source content management system, was chosen because it is used by newspapers and has a customizable framework. Fedora is the asset manager component and serves as the integration point for all content flowing in and out of the system.

CoolStateLA team members are Farrukh Shakil - Fedora integration; Dhaval Joshi - Joomla; Mark Luntzel - RSS Feed Filter; Manoj Katwal - User Interface, and; Sepideh Nazari - Workflow. For more information contact Florencio Almirol.

This year's JA-SIG conference is being planned collaboratively by representatives from many organizations including Fedora Commons. The 17th annual event will be held in Saint Paul, MN, April 27-30, 2008.

The 2008 program will focus on four tracks:

• Community Source Management/Governance: What are best practices for managing community source projects or their deployments on campus? For encouraging adoption? For gaining acceptance and campus buy-in? For engaging your community in the processes? Presentations for managers, team leaders, executives, planners and strategists.
• Design and Development: For developers, architects, UX designers, testers. Presentations for people who build community source products, use them as a development framework or want to learn more about doing so. These are technical topics, tips and techniques, how-to's.
• Deployment and Integration: Presentations for people who need to make applications work on campus: developers, content providers, team leaders, evangelists. In particular, we would like to highlight work that integrates community source projects within the enterprise infrastructure and with each other.
• Multiple Audiences: Presentations that span multiple projects or audience types. Community source project introductions and overviews.

Proposals may be submitted until February 22, 2008. For more information please visit http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/08spring/index.html.

The Lyon 2 University, a member of the Lyon University Consortium, will host OpeniWorld: Euorpe 2008 in collaboration with MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative June 25-27 in Lyon, France. The symposium and workshop will focus on resource federation - a key educational technology challenge. Federation offers the promise of inter-institutional collaboration towards effective learning as well as market opportunities for providers and consumers of educational content, software and services.

The OpeniWorld Scientific Committee is soliciting papers for presentation at the June Symposium that address the opportunities, challenges, and solutions relating to federating educational resources. Submissions are due no later than February 22, 2008.

For more information about the five general paper categories, including submission outline and contact information please visit http://www.openiworld.org/Europe2008.

The deadline for submitting papers to the International Fedora User Group Meeting at Open Repositories 2008 is fast approaching: Monday, February, 4th 2008. Submissions should be approximately one page in length. If you've got something Fedora-related to share with a global community, it won't take long to put this proposal together!

For full details see the full story below; or contact Richard Green, Fedora User Group Meeting Chair and Manager, RIDIR, REMAP and RepoMMan Projects e-SIG, Academic Services at R.Green@hull.ac.uk, University of Hull.

The Bloomsbury Colleges consortium (University of London) invites participation in a no-cost Fedora 3.0 Beta Workshop on Feb. 7, 2008. New software features — ReST, API-M lite, Content Object Models and more — will be presented and discussed. Suggestions regarding workshop activities that will support development progress are welcome, or if you are just plain curious about what Fedora 3.0 Beta has to offer — developers, librarians, administrators — please join us!

The event will be held in Bloomsbury London (Birkbeck College, building 1, entrance from Tavistock Square, Room B29).

Matt Zumwalt, Media Shelf, will be the instructor for the day. A Fedora newcomers session will begin the day at 9 a.m. Participants will set up Fedora 3.0 on Amazon Web Services (EC2 and S3) at 9:00 a.m. in order to have a working repository to use throughout the day. If you would like to get started on setting up a repository right now, see the Fedorazon documentation at Fedorazon How to Guides. And, yes, Fedora can be set up in just a day — actually in an hour!

Advanced users will begin at 10.30 a.m. Please arrive a bit early to set up WiFi. Sessions will end at 4:30 p.m. Participants will be encouraged to head to the pub to carry on further important discussions over a couple of pints, so do consider booking a late train.

The workshop is available free of charge and includes pizza! Please bring a laptop with WiFi capabilities.

If you are visiting London from afar, find a hotel using http://www.lastminute.com and search for a hotel near the "British Museum" or "British Library" which will put you within walking distance of Birkbeck in Bloomsbury.

Space is limited so please RSVP by email to David Flanders d.flanders@bloomsbury.ac.uk with:
your name
interest in Fedora, and
time you will be arriving

Bloomsbury Colleges consortium will also host a joint repository developer meeting (Dspace-ePrints-Fedora) on February 8th. If interested in attending, please email David or watch this space: http://tinyurl.com/29s9jg.

JCDL 2008, "Bridging Culture, Bridging Technology," will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 16-20, 2008. Proposals for tutorials are now being accepted.

Tutorials are intended to provide in-depth coverage of a single technical or cultural subject supporting one or more of the main conference themes. Tutorials can be either a half-day or a full-day in duration. The format should be instructional in nature. Upon completion of the tutorial, the audience should have acquired a coherent body of knowledge related to the tutorial subject.

Tutorial proposals must include:

• Title: short title that identifies the tutorial
• Abstract: 1-2 paragraphs describing the tutorial
• Learning Objectives: a one paragraph definition of learning objectives, which will be used by reviewers to assess the proposal
• Length: duration of the tutorial (half- or full-day)
• Participant Count: minimum and maximum number of participants
• Target Audience: description of the nature of the target audience including professional/scholarly background (e.g., librarians, computer scientists, etc.) and level of experience (e.g., introductory, intermediate, advanced)
• Presenter Bios: a brief biographical sketch of the presenter(s); and contact information of the presenter(s).

Note that the tutorial title and abstract should be written to attract the target audience (rather than the reviewers) since these components will appear in the conference program.

Conference Web site: http://www.jcdl2008.org/
For more information about JCDL tutorials: http://www.jcdl2008.org/calltutorials.html

Tutorial proposals must be submitted in electronic form via the JCDL 2008 submission Web page by February 8, 2008. For further information please contact the Tutorial Chairs, Carl Lagoze lagoze@cs.cornell.edu, or Sandy Payette payette@cs.cornell.edu.

One of the issues raised during the National Institute of Standards (NISO) Forum "Getting the Most out of Your Repository" last month in Beltsville, Maryland, was the need for communications among those who are maintaining and building institutional repositories. The clear need to build a sense of community among repository managers was a topic on the minds of attendees in presentations and during breaks. An active email distribution list for sharing problems, concerns, and ideas has been created to help build this sense of community, and allow participants to more effectively address their repository practices and development.

A new open forum REPOMAN-L (Institutional Repository Managers' Mailing List) is offered for the discussion of issues and ideas that confront repository managers. The organizers hope that individuals will subscribe and participate enthusiastically, and use this list for problem-solving and sharing advice, for example:

• poll the group on practices at their institutions
• ask about any aspect of development from policy to outreach initiatives to software evaluation
• share links to useful tools and references
• explore rationale around decisions list members are making about their repository.

The REPOMAN-L mailing list is focused on finding out how individuals are confronting the challenges associated with each institution's repository on a day-to-day basis and solutions that have been found. The success of this new forum will hinge on sharing ideas and concerns, to consider them with open minds, and to offer colleagues the best advice possible.

REPOMAN-L is for problem-solving and community-building: it is the hope of the list creators that individuals will participate and continue to encourage and support the open exchange of ideas.

How To Subscribe:
To subscribe to REPOMAN-L, go to https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A0=REPOMAN-L, click "Join or Leave REPOMAN-L," and fill in the fields. You will be sent an email to confirm your subscription. (For those who are already familiar with LISTSERV lists, you may also subscribe by sending the command "subscribe repoman-l" in an email message to listserv@listserv.indiana.edu.) Once you have subscribed, you can send questions and comments to repoman-l@listserv.indiana.edu for distribution to the list subscribers.

REPOMAN-L is hosted by Indiana University, but is not affiliated with the University. Contact Richard Griscom (griscom@upenn.edu), University of Pennsylvania, or Leah Vanderjagt (lvanderj@library.ualberta.ca), University of Alberta, with questions.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) Initiative defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources. If you are planning to attend the Open Repositories 2008 Conference you may also be interested in attending this one-day meeting.

The OAI-ORE European Open Meeting will be held on April 4, 2008, at the University of Southampton, in conjunction with Open Repositories 2008, to roll-out the beta release of the OAI-ORE specifications. This meeting is the European follow-on to a meeting that will be held in the USA on March 3, 2008, at Johns Hopkins University.

The OAI-ORE specifications describe a data model to identify and describe aggregations of web resources, and they introduce machine-readable formats to describe these aggregations based on ATOM and RDF/XML.

The current, alpha version of the OAI-ORE specifications is available at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.1/.

Read the full press release for this event at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/EUKickoffPressrelease.pdf.

Register for the event at http://regonline.com/eu-oai-ore.

Note that registration is required and space is limited.

Dutch-based Func. Internet Integration has announced the release of Flori 1.0, a new Fedora open source add-on that enables a web graphical user interface (GUI) for learning object repositories.

Flori (Fedora Learning Object Repository Interface) is a web front-end for Fedora that specializes in managing learning objects and their metadata. Key features include virtual repositories and flexible metadata schema's, such an IEEE-LOM. A Dutch localization is provided. Adding other languages is easy.

Flori was developed for 'Kennisnet Ict op school.' The foundation Kennisnet is a public ICT support organization established by and for education. Kennisnet manages the interests of the Dutch education sector, offers ICT related knowledge and delivers public educational services and products to renew and innovate education.

Kennisnet's goal is to stimulate schools in the Netherlands to incorporate the use of learning object repositories in instruction. Flori was developed by Func. Internet Integration as an entry-level repository product. After a successful roll-out in the Netherlands, the product is now released by Kennisnet under the terms of the GPL.

For more information please visit the project's SourceForge website where screenshots, downloads and support are provided.

The 12th release of the popular Fedora software is now available for testing. The first beta version of Fedora 3.0 featuring a Content Model Architecture (CMA), an integrated structure for persisting and delivering the essential characteristics of digital objects in Fedora, is available at http://www.fedora-commons.org/. The Fedora CMA plays a central role in the Fedora architecture, in many ways forming the over-arching conceptual framework for future development of Fedora Repositories.

Like a well-thumbed book on a shelf, digital content is stored with the expectation that intellectual works will be the same each time they are accessed, whether the content was put away yesterday, or many years ago. Fedora is a simple, flexible and evolvable approach to delivering and sharing the "essential characteristics" of enduring digital content. Librarians, archivists, records managers, media producers, authors and publishers use patterns of expression formats such as books, journals, articles, collections to convey the essential characteristics of content. The capabilities of digital tools combined with essential characteristics of digital works result in well-understood patterns of expression for different types of content models.

The software engineering community also utilizes patterns of expression for the development of complex computer systems. The same concepts that satisfy agile IT infrastructures can help provide solutions for creating, accessing and preserving content. The Fedora CMA builds on the Fedora architecture-downloaded more than 18,000 times in the last 12 months-to simplify use while unlocking potential.

Dan Davis, Chief Software Architect, Fedora Commons, explains the CMA in the context of Fedora 3.0, "It's a hybrid. The Fedora CMA handles content models that are used by publishers and others, and is also a computer model that describes an information representation and processing architecture." By combining these viewpoints, Fedora CMA has the potential to provide a way to build an interoperable repository for integrated information access within organizations and to provide durable access to our intellectual works.

We encourage the Fedora community to download and experiment with Fedora 3.0 Beta 1. It is particularly important to receive comments while the software is still being developed to help ensure this important update to the Fedora architecture meets the needs of the community. Please contribute your observations and comments to fedora-commons-developers@lists.sourceforge.net or fedora-commons-users@lists.sourceforge.net. Fedora 2.2.1 will remain available for all production repository instances.

API-M-LITE
A simple web interface for managing and modifying objects is an item on many Fedora Users' wish lists. For the release of Fedora 3.0 Beta 1 developer Matt Zumwalt, MediaShelf, decided to take the lead by creating API-M LITE. Zumwalt says, "The idea of Restful interfaces has gotten a lot of traction lately, especially in the Ruby world. It seemed like a good fit for Fedora, so MediaShelf decided to make it happen. I have been using the API since August and am certain that it will enable all of us to start using Fedora in radical new ways. We are very happy to contribute this code to Fedora Commons and look forward to making further contributions in the future."

Acknowledgements
The release of Fedora 3.0 is made possible by a collaborative partnership with community developers and the Fedora core software development team that include: Chris Wilper (Fedora Commons), Eddie Shin (Fedora Commons), Robert Haschart (Fedora Commons),, Ross Wayland (Fedora Commons),Matt Zumwalt (API-M LITE, Media Shelf), Cuong Tran (API-M LITE, Digital Innovation South Africa), and many others.

Overview of new Features in Fedora 3.0 Beta 1 Release

• Content Model Architecture - Provides a model-driven approach for persisting and delivering the essential characteristics of digital content in Fedora
• API-M LITE - An experimental interface for the creating, modifying, and managing digital objects using a Web interface in a REST style
• Mulgara Support - Fedora now supports the Mulgara Semantic Triplestore replacing Kowari
• Migration Utility - Provides an update utility to convert existing collections for Content Model Architecture compatibility
• Relational Index Simplification - The Fedora schema was simplified making changes easier with having to reload the database
• Dynamic Behaviors - Object may added or removed dynamically from the system moving system checks into runtime errors
• Error Reporting - Provides improved runtime error details
• Owner as a CSV String - Enables using a CSV string as ownerID and in XACML policies
• Java 6 Compatibility - Fedora may be optionally compiled using Java 6
• Many new enhancements! (see: Release Notes)

Overview of Features Planned for the Fedora 3.0 Final Release

• Simple JMS Messaging - Integrates JMS messaging for sending notification of important events
• Administrative Client - Revised to support Content Model Architecture enhancements
• Message Update for GSearch - Provides a reference implementation for using JMS notifications to update search engines
• On-line Validation Testing - Hooks into the runtime error system to provide more meaningful error reports include conformance to content models and referential integrity checks
• Off-line Validation Testing - Provides system operators a way to validate the integrity of part or all of their repository
• Updated OAI Provider - Revises the OAI Provider to take advantage of the Content Model Architecture
• Updated Utilities - Revises all the Fedora-provided utilities for integrate properly with the Content Model Architecture

Fedora Commons invites you to submit proposals for the next Fedora User Group Meeting, to be held in conjunction with the Open Repositories 2008 conference. Developers, researchers and practitioners are invited to submit proposals for presentations describing their experiences implementing and using Fedora, or developing software associated with Fedora. The Fedora program committee is currently soliciting proposals for 20 minute presentations. Deadline for submissions is February 4th, 2008.

You will need to provide a title and an abstract of up to 400 words for your presentation. Papers will not be required. Please submit your proposal to the author submission site, powered by EasyChair. Select the submission category of "Fedora User Group."

Important Dates:
Paper Submission Deadline: Monday, February 4th, 2008
Notification of Acceptance: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Fedora User Meeting: April 3-4, 2008, University of Southampton, UK
Open Repositories 2008: April 1-4, 2008

Themes

Technical Solutions and Innovations: Topics include, but are not limited to:

• New services in the Fedora Service Framework
• Supporting e-research
• Building collaborative workspaces on top of Fedora
• RDF, semantic web technologies, triplestores
• Digital preservation and Fedora
• User interface development
• Storage solutions
• Security and access control
• Integrating workflow with Fedora

• Why the choice of Fedora for different use cases
• Building awareness and nurturing Fedora community development
• Sustainability strategies
• Developing and sharing content models and disseminators
• Fedora for publishing (scholarly, open access, etc.)
• Fedora for knowledge management (e.g., semantic technologies)
• Fedora for "e-research" and "community repositories"
• Mash-ups: Fedora plus public APIs (Fedorazon, Google Maps and Fedora etc.)

As another year ticks by, Fedora Commons communities are planning to meet all over the world. Look for additional news and information about 2008 Fedora Commons User Group meetings and events in Sweden, Canada and the United States as it becomes available.

Melbourne, Australia, February 8, 2008
Beginning in February, The ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) Project will host a one day Australian Users Meeting on Friday, February 8, 2008, at the Monash Conference Centre, Collins Street, Melbourne Austrailia.

Program:
9 - 10:30am Thornton Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Outreach for Fedora Commons, will discuss the latest version of Fedora and plans for Fedora Commons going forward, as well as offer a Q&A session.
10:30am - 11am Morning Tea

Reports from Australian Fedora Projects:
11am - 11:30am Christiaan Kortekaas (UQ)
11:30am - 12pm Chi Nguyen (RAMP Project)
12pm - 12:30pm Martyn George (UniSA)
12:30pm - 1pm Stewart Wallace (Dictionary of Sydney)

All are welcome and attendance is free, please RSVP to angela.lang@lib.monash.edu.au to plan for catering by January 15, 2008.

Southampton, England, April 3-4, 2008
The UK and Ireland Users Group will help organize the Fedora User Group Meeting to be held in conjunction with the 2008 Open Repositories Conference in Southampton on April 3-4, 2008. A call for proposals for the Fedora Users Group portion of the meeting will be available soon.

Belfast, Northern Ireland, July 2008
The next UK and Ireland Users Group meeting is tentatively scheduled to coincide with the Seventh International JISC/CNI Conference scheduled for July 2008 in Belfast.

On behalf of the OAI-ORE effort, Carl Lagoze, Cornell University, and Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, are pleased to announce the public alpha release of the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) User Guide and Specification documents. These are now available at http://openarchives.org/ore/toc.

These documents are the result of over a year of effort by a large group of people. Your feedback is requested on their contents as part of the effort to transition these documents to beta and then final production release.

The team has set up a Google Group to discuss these documents. Your comments are welcome there. Please keep these comments and the resulting discussion productive and focused. The URL of the Google Group is http://groups.google.com/group/oai-ore. You will also find this URL in the header note in the OAI-ORE documents.

You may also send mail to ore@openarchives.org, but we request you use this only for private comments to the editors. The goal is to keep this discussion public.

Finally, we'd like to remind you of two upcoming events related to OAI-ORE:

1. March 3rd 2008, John Hopkins University: USA ORE Open Meeting.
Register at http://www.regonline.com/oai-ore (limited to 150). Supported by Microsoft.
2. April 4th 2008, University of Southampton: European ORE Open Meeting.
In conjunction with Open Repositories 2008. Registration not yet available. Supported by JISC.

The Sun Microsystems™ Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (Sun PASIG), a group dedicated to working on the unique problems of storage and data management, workflow, and architecture for very large digital repositories, held its second meeting in Paris for 171 industry, education, government, and library services representatives from Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand on November 14-16, 2007. Sun PASIG plans to host a meeting of leaders concerned with issues of maintaining or restoring access to artifacts, documents and records semi-annually.

Day one was devoted to Sun technology workshops. The opening session reviewed the current state of asset management systems. The focus of presentations was in the commercial realm rather than on academic or library applications. The panel was made up of consultants and software integrators who had worked with Sun. Presentations from two Sun technologists on aspects of preservation and archiving followed. The day ended with a Sun Honeycomb Users' Group meeting. Representatives from eight different institutions that are using the StorageTek™ 5800 system, also known as "Sun Honeycomb," talked about their experiences. Most had recently received system hardware so had only just begun to work with the system; more than half of the presenters were using the Fedora software platform.

During the rest of the meeting presentations and updates were given on the status of Fedora Commons, DSpace and Eprints by a mix of academic and national library project professionals. The majority of projects and initiatives were using Fedora. National libraries were well represented, both on the program and among the participants. The majority of representatives expressed a preference for open-source software, and for the Fedora platform, in particular. A notable exception was the National Library of New Zealand, that is working with Ex Libris to develop a proprietary system. Working groups met to discuss topics that included Use Cases and Business Models, Architecture, Security and others.

Fedora Commons held an after-hours session to discuss ways to work with companies who provide software integration services and software products built around Fedora software. Companies represented included ATOS Origin, CARE Affiliates, FIZ Karlsruhe and VTLS, as well as representatives from Sun Microsystems. Several other interested people from the conference also attended.

Meeting presentations, agenda, and a list of attendees are available here. Questions about Sun PASIG activities may be sent to Art Pasquinelli, Education Market Strategist Sun Global Education and Research at art.pasquinelli@sun.com.

Earlier this month Sun Microsystems and Fedora Commons announced plans to integrate the Fedora Commons software platform with the Sun StorageTek™ 5800 System. Technical information about the "Sun Honeycomb" system, as it is also referred to, can be found here.

Additionally two whitepapers about the the Sun StorageTek™ 5800 System and Fedora are available from Sun. The first paper, Active Archiving Solution for eResearch Data Sets, is a solution brief that looks at Fedora plus Honeycomb for data archives:
http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_systems/enterprise/5800/eresearch_data_sets.pdf

The second, Delivering Digital Repositories With Open Solutions by Carl Grant, is a general whitepaper about repositories and Honeycomb with Fedora featured:
http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_systems/enterprise/5800/OpenSolutions_LR.pdf

Fedora users excel at finding opportunities to talk about making better use of Fedora software's unique capabilities. On November 22, 2007, 32 representatives from Fedora projects gathered at Birkbeck College in London for the most recent Fedora UK and Ireland User Group Meeting to do just that. The morning session featured reports from members followed by presentations of general interest in the afternoon. Chris Awre's (University of Hull) meeting notes and selected presentations are available online. Highlights from community presentations follow.

2007 marks the centenary anniversary of the National Library of Wales (NLW). What began as an experimental Fedora project at NLW over three years ago has become an ongoing program at this national library dedicated to preserving Welsh culture, heritage and knowledge for the people of Wales. Paul Bevan explained that NLW uses Fedora with VITAL. Challenges include ingest scalability of large collections that may include 1,000,000 images. NLW continues to look at ways to streamline overall processes to get more content "in," especially now that other teams at NLW have discovered what the repository can do for them.

Rightscom specialises in the provision of solutions for the management, trading and protection of intellectual property rights and digital content in the network environment. Martin Dow presented Fedora "as a storage layer in the overall technology stack" in a suite of ongoing projects: TIME (Testbed for Interoperability of Metadata for E-Books); RELI (Registry of Electornic Licences), and; RIDIR (Resourcing IDentifier Interoperability for Repositories). Collaborating with the University of Hull, they have identified the importance of semantics for the RIDIR project as clear descriptions of what is being described is essential. RDF functionality within Fedora is proving invaluable to this work.

David Flanders, Bloomsbury Colleges, presented an early look at a project that aims to "Enable anyone to easily install a repository system for their entire institution's use in one day; therefore allowing institutions to focus on the real work of the repository: collecting and enhancing their content!" Fedorazon (Fedora plus Amazon Web Services) will accomplish this by using "Amazon Web Services (AWS) which will enable libraries to forego the cost and maintenance fees of server hardware installations (outsourcing the work to AWS's EC2 and S3). Instead the server configuration for Fedora will be pre-loaded as an "Amazon Machine Image" which enables the immediate "out of the box" installation of Fedora on a highly-scalable and robust network."

The StORe (Source-to-Output Repositories) Project is a collaborative effort among 9 UK and US institutional partners led by the University of Edinburgh that seeks to add value to the intellectual products of academic research by enabling repositories of published reports and papers to interact directly with the repositories of source data. Fedora is used as a gateway for people to upload data into the Archive. They are also keen on investigating Muradora as a way to implement security.

The UK and Ireland Users Group has agreed to help organize the Fedora User Group Meeting to be held in Southhampton on April 3-4, 2008, as part of the Open Repositories Conference. The next UK and Ireland Users meeting will be held in Dublin to coincide with the Seventh International JISC/CNI Conference scheduled for July 2008 in Belfast.

The University of Maryland Libraries has announced the launch of its digital collections portal at http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/.

This release marks two and a half years of work in the creation of a repository that serves the teaching and research mission of the University of Maryland Libraries. Many of the objects are digital versions from Maryland's Special Collections (such as A Treasury of World's Fairs Art and Architecture) or are new virtual collections (The Jim Henson Works). Other collections (such as Films@UM) support the teaching mission of the Libraries. This release also marks the integration of electronically available finding aids, ArchivesUM, into the repository architecture, creating a framework for digital objects to be dynamically discovered from finding aids.

The repository is based on the Fedora platform, uses Lucene for indexing, and Helix for streaming video. The repository features almost 2500 digital objects, with new objects added monthly. Object types currently delivered include full text (both TEI and EAD), video, and images. Objects can be discovered within a collection context or via a search across multiple collections. Cross-collection discovery is achieved through a common metadata scheme and controlled vocabulary. This metadata scheme also provides for individual collections to have more granular domain-specific metadata.

Feedback and comments are welcome at http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/contact.jsp.

With Fedora under the hood, statewide collaborators on the "New Jersey Digital Highway" (http://www.njdigitalhighway.org/) are providing seamless access to historical collections for every user in the state. Funded in part by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the New Jersey Digital Highway is a three-plus-year project led by Rutgers University that has digitized more than 10,000 pictures, records, and oral histories and is serving as a model for how to connect community cultural organizations through a central Web site.

"This is about local ownership and shared access," says Linda Langschied of Rutgers University Libraries and PI for the NJDH project. "It is a true statewide preservation service. It's books, reports, audio, and video. The services developed for collections owners is a critical component. We don't do the work for the cultural heritage partners. It's their collection - they manage it, they run it. But we assist with consultation and can lend equipment."

What that meant was finding a digital platform that could be used by all statewide institutions to mount their objects and descriptive metadata. They found that platform in FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) that is both customizable and allows local institutions to have true control over what they digitize and make available.

With a promise to digitize some 10,000 objects, Rutgers went forward with 17 partners that include large state institutions like public television station NJN to small and diverse collection holders like Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center and the American Hungarian Foundation. They launched the site showcasing a topic near and dear to New Jersey residents: the state's rich immigrant heritage.

"We are the immigrant state," Langschied says. "For so many people, this was the doorstep to America. New Jersey is among the most diverse states in the nation, with so many wonderful stories to tell. This was a perfect opportunity."

Merging collections from around the state, The Changing Face of New Jersey: the Immigration Experience from Earliest Times to the Present covers four centuries of immigration in the Garden State through eye-catching, fully searchable maps, photos, sheepskin deeds, audio and video histories, immigration records, letters, and diaries. Through the Web site, teachers can find curriculum content standards, desk references on history and ethnic education, and lessons on how to use digitized and primary resources in history education. Students can get help with homework or questions about New Jersey culture and history or get advice and assistance with research papers. And researchers can find links to genealogy resources from the state and individual counties to help uncover family histories.

With 10,000-plus visitors a month, evaluations of the New Jersey Digital Highway have been glowing thus far, according to a final report, with visitors lauding the layout and the integration of different communities.

The accolades don't end at New Jersey's borders. When Virginia Tech suffered tragedy earlier this year with a horrific student shooting, tributes, letters and messages of condolence piled up quickly. By the end, the university had amassed more than 75,000 pieces, but had no plan in place to deal with them. Within the technology community, Rutgers had earned so much renown for its adaptation of FEDORA that Virginia Tech immediately contacted the university's library to help create an online digital memorial and repository. That project continues, with plans to have a Web site up in the near future.

"We want to become the best digital library project that exists," Langschied says. "We want to partner with other organizations, form a close community of FEDORA users and engage in collaborative development with them. At the end of the day, our goal is to provide seamless access to historical collections for every user in the state."

NJDH Contacts:

Linda Langschied, Project Management- langschi@rci.rutgers.edu

Ron Jantz, Digital Library Architecture - rjantz@rci.rutgers.edu

Mary Beth Weber, Metadata - mbfecko@rci.rutgers.edu

Isaiah Beard, Digital Imaging - isaiah.beard@rutgers.edu

(Adapted from the Institute of Museum and Library Services profile: http://www.imls.gov/profiles/Nov07.shtm)

(Calls for Posters and User Group Participation to follow later) http://www.openrepositories.org/2008

We invite developers, researchers and practitioners to submit papers describing novel experiences or developments in the construction and use of digital repositories. Submissions of UP TO 4 pages in length are requested for review. See the CFP page at the conference site for submission instructions. Submissions for panel discussions are also requested.

Repositories are being deployed in a variety of settings (research, scholarship, learning, science, cultural heritage) and across a range of scales (subject, national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). The aim of this conference is to address the technical, managerial, practical and theoretical issues that arise from diverse applications of repositories in the increasingly pervasive information environment.

A program of papers, panel discussions, poster presentations, workshops, tutorials and developer coding sessions will bring together all the key stakeholders in the field. Open source software community meetings for the major platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) will also provide opportunities to advance and coordinate the development of repository installations across the world.

IMPORTANT DATES AND CONTACT INFO

• Paper Submission Deadline: Friday 7th December 2007
• Notification of Acceptance: Monday 21st January 2008
• Submission of DSpace/EPrints/Fedora User Group Presentations: TBA
• Submission of Posters: Monday 4th February 2008
• Conference: April 1-4, 2008 University of Southampton, UK

Enquiries to: Program Committee Chair (e.lyon@ukoln.ac.uk) or General Chair (lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

Conference Themes

The themes of the conference include (but are not limited to) the following:

TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE IN THE KNOWLEDGE WORKPLACE

• Embedding repositories in business processes and individual workflow.
• Change Management
• Advocacy and Culture Change
• Policy development and policy lag.

PROFESSIONALISM AND PRACTICE

• Professional Development
• Workforce Capacity
• Skills and Training
• Roles and Responsibilities

SUSTAINABILITY

• Economic sustainability and new business models.
• Technical sustainability of a repository over time, including platform change and migration.
• Technical sustainability of holdings over time. Preservation. Audit, certification. Trust. Assessment tools.
• Managing sustainability failure - when a repository outlives its organization or its organizational commitment.

LEGAL ISSUES

• Embargoes
• Licensing and Digital Rights Management
• Mandates
• Overcoming legislative barriers
• Contractual relationships - facilitating and monitoring
• International and cross-border issues

SUCCESSFUL INTEROPERABILITY

• Content standards - discipline-specific vs. general
• Metadata standards and application profiles
• Quality standards and quality control processes
• Achieving interchange in multi-disciplinary or multi-institutional environments
• Semantic web and linked data
• Identifier management for data and real world resources
• Access and authentication

MODELS, ARCHITECTURES AND FRAMEWORKS

• Beyond OAIS
• Federations
• Institutional Models - uber- or multi-repository environments
• Adapting to changing e-infrastructure: SOA, services, cloud computing
• Scalability

VALUE CHAINS and SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS

• Multi-stakeholder value: preservation, open access, research, management, administration
• Multi-agenda, multi-function, multi-purpose repositories
• Usefulness and usability
• Reference, reuse, reanalysis and repurposing of content
• Citation of data / learning objects
• Changes in scholarly practice
• New benchmarks for scholarly success
• Repository metrics
• Bibliometrics: usage and impact

SERVICES BUILT ON REPOSITORIES

• OAI services
• User-oriented services
• Mashups
• Social networking
• Commentary / tagging
• Searching / information discovery
• Alerting
• Mining
• Visualisation
• Integration with Second life and Virtual environments

USE CASES FOR REPOSITORIES

• E-research/E-science (e.g., data and publication; collaborative services)
• E-scholarship
• Institutional repositories
• Discipline-oriented repositories
• Open Access
• Scholarly Publishing
• Digital Library
• Cultural Heritage
• Scientific repositories / data repositories
• Interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral repositories

Fedora Commons, a non-profit organization which provides sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital information assets, announced today plans to integrate the Fedora Commons software platform with the Sun StorageTek™ 5800 System. This collaboration provides a substantial opportunity to advance open systems for durable access to the digital information assets, which increasingly forms the basis for our intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage.

The Fedora Commons free, open-source software platform uses a service-oriented architecture that enables the creation of collaborative, integrated information spaces where any information entity can be linked to any other entity. The StorageTek 5800 system has advanced data integrity, resilience and failure tolerance over other storage system designs, and includes customer-defined arbitrary metadata indexing and search. Customers can seamlessly scale, saving millions of dollars in administrative costs over traditional storage, and be assured of an advanced level of data availability.

During the creation or authoring of intellectual works, changes occur rapidly, but over their lifecycle these works become fixed information assets. New scholarship is built upon earlier works and new science is built upon other research. Without durable access to previous works, research progress cannot be sustained. Unless key digital assets such as datasets and analyses are reliably kept and their authenticity is guaranteed, the scientific method may be compromised and the results may be questioned. The StorageTek 5800 provides a powerful capability to handle fixed unstructured information assets.

The Fedora Commons software platform and StorageTek 5800 architecture form a natural synergy for the creation, management, use and care of fixed information. Both systems recognize that, over time, all technologies and formats change. Dan Davis, Fedora Commons Chief Software Architect, notes, "We must develop an open-ended, evolutionary, interoperable architecture, built upon open standards, to ensure that our digital heritage remains accessible and useful, now and in the future."

It is hard to imagine all the ways in which our digital information assets will be used and how knowledge will be synthesized in the future. Users and software applications must be free to use, fuse (mash-up), and repurpose information in new and innovative ways. Dan Davis observed, "The StorageTek 5800 extensive and flexible support for metadata closely integrated with the content is a natural enabler for the Fedora Commons semantic linking and dissemination capabilities. Using our offerings together will provide a straightforward, easy way to support the entire information lifecycle from creation to preservation, and to facilitate rapidly building innovative applications or mash-ups while ensuring your information is secure."

To learn more about Fedora and Sun solutions for digital content, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org and http://sun.com/storagetek/.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo and StorageTek are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

The National Science Digital Library (http://nsdl.org) Core Integration team at Cornell University led by Dean Krafft presented an overview of "NCore," an open source suite of technologies and standards that power the National Science Digital Library's (NSDL) core infrastructure, at NSDL's Annual Meeting held in Washington, D.C., November 6-8, 2007. Download the presentation.

NCore technologies and standards replace NSDL's original metadata records-based data paradigm allowing for greater flexibility in collaborating and creating context around library resources. In the initiative's first phase, completed in January 2007, NSDL Core Integration successfully implemented existing library services on top of NCore—a change that was largely invisible to users. Now, NSDL is leveraging what the Fedora-based NCore platform has to offer by introducing next-generation library services and collaborative tools.

Managing and Maintaining Digital Libraries with NCore

NCore is a general platform for building semantic and virtual digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications. DLESE, the Digital Library for Earth Science Education (http://dlese.org), ported their existing infrastructure to NSDL using NCore. By overlaying their data model on top of the NCore model, developers enabled specialized DLESE services to continue without loss of functionality, and to co-exist alongside of, but independent from, NSDL.

The NCore API (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nsdl-core) was used to build the DLESE index by reading DLESE metadata from the Fedora-based NSDL Data Repository (NDR), using the NDR API (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nsdl-core), and then building the index. The key technical point in this step was to extract the required metadata from NDR objects.

The DLESE Search Service is run from the index and is used to power the DLESE library search and browse functionality. Use of the NSDL Data Repository as the primary metadata repository required no modifications to DLESE Search Service. The indexes and search service remain the same, which means the DLESE library interface and all other interfaces that use the NCore service continue to operate without modification.

Inside NCore

The NCore platform consists of a central repository built on top of Fedora, a data model, an API, and a number of fundamental services such as full-text search or OAI-PMH. Innovative NSDL services and tools that empower users as content creators are now built on, or transitioning to, the NCore platform. These include: the Expert Voices blogging system (http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/); the NSDL Wiki (http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/NSDL_Wiki); the NSDL OAI-PMH metadata ingest aggregation system; the OAI-PMH service for distributing public NSDL metadata; the NSDL Collection System (NCS), derived from the DLESE Collection system (DCS); the NSDL Search service; and the OnRamp content management and distribution system (http://onramp.nsdl.org).

Because NCore is a general Fedora-based open source platform useful beyond NSDL, Core Integration developers at Cornell University have made the repository and API code components of NCore available for download at the NCore project on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nsdl-core). Over the next six months, NSDL will release the code for major tools and services that comprise the full NCore suite on SourceForge.

The NCore project aims to support NSDL's continued growth as a semantic and virtual digital library providing open source educational cyberinfrastructure services and tools in support of teaching and learning, while meeting the needs of new, existing, and evolving digital libraries. For more information contact Aaron Birkland (birkland@cs.cornell.edu).

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0227648, 0227656, and 0227888. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

On March 3, 2008, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) will hold a public meeting at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, to introduce the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications. The ORE specifications are developed in response to a significant challenge that has emerged in eScholarship. In contrast to the paper publications of traditional scholarship, or even their digital counterparts, the artifacts of eScholarship are complex aggregations. These aggregations consist of multiple resources with varying media types, semantics types, network locations, and intra- and inter-relationships. The future of scholarly communication, research, and higher education infrastructure requires standardized approaches to identify, describe, and exchange these new outputs of scholarship.

The ORE specifications address this challenge with the ORE data model that defines how to associate an identifier, a URI, with aggregations of web resources. By referring to these identifiers, aggregations can then be linked to, cited, and described with metadata, in the same manner as any web resource. The ORE data model also makes it possible to describe the structure and semantics of these aggregations. The ORE specifications define how these descriptions can then be packaged in the XML-based Atom syndication format or in RDF/XML, making them available to a variety of applications.

In addition to their utility in eScholarship, the ORE specifications also apply to our everyday web use where we often encounter aggregations such as multi-page HTML documents and collections of multi-format images on sites like flickr. OAI-ORE descriptions of these aggregations can be used to improve search engine behavior, provide input for browser-based navigation tools, and develop automated web services to analyze and preserve this information.

The March 3 meeting at Hopkins is intended for information managers and strategists, and implementers of networked information systems. It will be led by the two coordinators of OAI-ORE, Carl Lagoze of Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Attendees will learn about the ORE data model. They will also learn about the translation of this data model to the XML-based ATOM syndication format. In addition, they will hear the results of initial experiments with the specifications by OAI-ORE community members. There will be ample time for discussion and questions and to meet other members of the OAI-ORE community. Detailed information for the meeting is at the registration page at http://www.regonline.com/oai-ore (NOTE: attendees must register in advance and attendance is limited). A subsequent meeting with similar content will be held in the UK in connection with the Open Repositories 2008 Conference. An announcement will be made when details are settled.

About the Open Archives Initiative: The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination, sharing, and reuse of web-based content. OAI-ORE work is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Microsoft Corporation, and the National Science Foundation (IIS-0430906). More information is available at http://www.openarchives.org.

The Office of Digital Collections and Research (http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/) at the University of Maryland Library began implementing Fedora to make their digital resources more accessible in January 2005. The University of Maryland Libraries (http://www.lib.umd.edu/), like many academic libraries, include not only familiar books and journals of the general collections, but many rare and unique materials.

Among those unique digital collections using Fedora disseminators for their objects is the Jim Henson Works (http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/henson/). This collection is curated by the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library and spans 35 years of Henson's groundbreaking work in television and film. In collaboration with the Disney Corporation, Jim Henson Works makes over 70 digital videos from Henson's career available to UM's community of students, scholars, and visitors. Fedora programmer Paul Hammer explains, "Fedora makes it possible to ingest a collection and maintain rights on individual items or objects. Fedora gives the go-ahead to a Real Server to stream rich media."

Jim Henson Works was created by an interdisciplinary team: http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/henson/credits.jsp.

For more information contact Paul Hammer (phammer@umd.edu).

The DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) team at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia is pleased to announce the V1.0 release of Muradora, an easy to use repository application that supports federated identity (via Shibboleth authentication) and flexible authorization (using XACML). Muradora leverages the modularity, flexibility and scalability of the well-known Fedora repository.

Muradora's unique vision is one where Fedora forms the core back-end repository, while different front-end applications (such as portlets or standalone web interfaces) can all talk to the same instance of Fedora, and yet maintain a consistent approach to access control.

Muradora's key features are:

• "Out-of-the-box" or customized deployment options
• Intuitive access control editor allows end-users to specify their own access control criteria without editing any XML.
• Hierarchical enforcement of access control policies. Access control can be set at the collection level, object level or datastream level.
• Metadata input and validation for any well-formed metadata schema using XForms (a W3C standard). New metadata schemas can be supported via XForms scripts (no Muradora code modification required).
• Flexible and extensible architecture based on the well known Java Spring enterprise framework.
• Multiple deployments of Muradora (each customized for their own specific purpose) can talk to the one instance of Fedora.
• Freely available as open source software (Apache 2 license). All dependent software is also open source.

Muradora utilises the new Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture (DRAMA Auth/Z Suite). It consists of the following components:

• Extended XACML support with a native XML database (DB XML) for efficient storing and querying of XACML policies. There is also a new hierarchical policy combination algorithm to support hierarchical enforcement while still allowing for fine-grained access control. These extended XACML features can be used by any XACML-aware application, especially those requiring better management of their policies.
• Pluggable and extensible authorization infrastructure for Fedora. This new architecture utilizes an interceptor pattern to remove embedded authorization logic inside Fedora and allows new authorization requirements to be added to the system without modifying any code inside Fedora.
• Support for federated identity with Shibboleth. The actual Shibboleth authentication is done on the Fedora server itself. This is different to the common approach of having the web interface handle Shibboleth authentication which would prevent multiple web interfaces talking to the same Fedora instance. Again this module is pluggable and can be deployed on top of Fedora without any code modification. It can also be used in conjunction with existing Fedora authentication modules.

Muradora and DRAMA Auth/Z suite can be downloaded separately and installed together by following the deployment guide at (http://www.muradora.org).

However, due to configuration flexibility and the large number of components, this installation method should be attempted only by experienced Fedora administrators.

For other users, we recommend our Live DVD which integrates all necessary components for an "out-of-the-box" repository. The Live DVD can be used to try Muradora by booting the system from the DVD and running the pre-installed system directly from the DVD (no changes are made to the host computer's hard disk). Alternatively, the Live DVD can install Muradora on a server following an easy installation procedure that is based on Ubuntu Linux Distribution. Muradora Live DVD can be downloaded from http://www.muradora.org/software.

More information:

Muradora Website: http://www.muradora.org
Software download: http://www.muradora.org/software

Acknowledgement:

DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) is part of the RAMP project (http://www.ramp.org.au) based at MELCOE, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia (http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au). RAMP is funded by DEST under Backing Australia's Ability.

The “Islandora” vision, as Mark Leggott, UPEI University Librarian has dubbed the Fedora-UPEI Project, has an ambitious set of goals. He arrived at the name inspired by Che Nyguen's earlier Sept. 20, 2007 presentation to a group of Canadian Maritime librarians, archivists, and developers at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) about security issues and the turnkey GUI for Fedora repository federated identity and flexible access control system - Muradora.

Leggott and his UPEI team aim to create a seamless digital repository system that is integrated into their users' environments and contexts. They will integrate the Fedora digital repository system into primary campus systems using Drupal, a proprietary content management system, Moodle, Groupwise and Open Office. They will also provide support for “landscapes” tailored for administrative, learning, and research at UPEI.

Read the NSDL Road Reports blog post here: http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/roadreports/.

Anyone who has put a web site together about an interesting topic has seen its content expand in proportion to interest and use. Good information tends to become more complex over time as web site displays, interactive features, new kinds of content, web services, and access to multiple data storage facilities are added. Management of even modest online information facilities can end up being perceived by users as a patchwork of access and preservation — elegant pieces cleverly stitched together without an plan for how the information will persist — a liability for those who may need it most.

The Open Access Repository System (OARS) Project has plans to migrate just such a collection of significant, well-used, and yet fragmented resources from the Forced Migration Online (FMO) Digital Library, a digital repository of scholarly resources based at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, to an open source platform based on Fedora in the next two years. With funding from JISC, the OARS repository will be the largest on its subject area in the world representing a unique and expanding collection of resources highly valued by the user community it serves. The OARS repository will improve management, and will also interoperate with other global open access systems, as well as with the University of Oxford’s institutional repository. The repository’s long-term preservation will be ensured by compliance with JISC Information Environment open source software and open standards. Ultimately, the new repository will help create an information environment about forced migration that is discoverable and accessible to a much wider community of users and contributors.

Force Migration Online (FMO) contains regional resources, multimedia, journals handbooks and guidelines and working papers that address what happens when people have to leave their homes or homelands to escape from political or natural disasters. FMO uses the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) definition for forced migration: “A general term that refers to the movements of refugees and internally displaced people (people displaced by conflicts) as well as people displaced by natural or environmental disasters, chemical or nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects.”

The Oxford Research Archive (ORA) team are also using the Fedora repository system for the construction of the University of Oxford’s institutional repository. The ORA team has developed an open source management and search interface for Fedora. The OARS Project will develop a browser–based management and search interface for their Fedora–based repository based on the ORA work and in compliance with ORA open standards.

For more information on the OARS Project contact Mike Cave, Co-Director or Sean Loughna, Co-Director.

The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (The Alliance) is a consortium of 11 partner libraries including the Denver Public Library. The Alliance shares development, costs, servers, and personnel.

The Alliance is currently seeking proposals for the design, development, and integration of a robust user interface for its Alliance Digital Repository service. The interface will provide a customizable "look and feel" to the ADR's initial discovery and access portal, encompassing the searching, browsing, and viewing actions related to digital content, including jpegs, pdfs, xml documents, and audio and video files. The interface will bring together multiple software platforms (Fedora,