Fedora™
March 31, 2008 : Version 3.0 beta 1 and Version 2.2.2 of Fedora™ are available for download through the Fedora Commons web site.October 15, 2007: A New Version of the Collectus Digital Object Collector Tool source code is available for download.
The first responsibility of a digital library system is that it manages the electronic assets in a way that provides maximum security while providing flexible, appropriate levels of access to everything in our collection. It must also do as much as possible to ease the task of maintaining the storage and archiving of the assets. The data model for the digital objects is crucial to the design of the entire system. Essentially, each digital object is a free agent in the system, carrying all of the information needed to understand and use it. Etexts, images, collections, etc. are all represented as independent objects in the system, as are thesauri, union lists, indices and other types of information structures. The repository architecture must be able to completely implement the data model for objects that are not resident on our systems as well as for those that are. For objects that are not ours but for which we are acting as the primary gateway, the repository should be able to maintain the metadata package and methods for each object and the registry should be able to uniquely identify it. We should be able to create our own behaviors for the remote objects that make them usable in our system. The Flexible and Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora™) system, designed by the Cornell Digital Library Research Group, showed great promise as the core architecture of a digital repository system when we first reviewed it in a 1999 D-Lib article. The University of Virginia Library' s Digital Library Research and Development Group (DLR&D) is collaborating with Cornell to develop Fedora under a $1,000,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, which has also funded a $1,400,000 Fedora Phase 2 grant. In the first phase of the project, UVa implemented a prototype repository based on the Fedora™ architecture (see the July 2000 D-Lib Magazine article ) using a relational database combined with Java servlets that provide a web interface. The first phase UVa production repository launched its alpha version for evaluation during the 2004-2005 academic year (see the October 2005 D-Lib article). The beta version was launched in fall 2005. Fedora™ is intended to leave a great deal of room for a repository to develop to serve local needs while providing enough structure to guarantee interoperability with other repositories. See Building an American Studies Information Community to read a description of a Mellon-funded project that developed collections and disseminator prototypes for the UVa Repository, and visit the prototype American Studies Information Community. Version 1.0 was released under on May 16, 2003. VTLS, Inc. has announced the release of VITAL, which provides "VTLS developed workflow extensions, management utilities and enhanced searching capabilities" built on top of the Fedora repository system architecture. For further information about VITAL, please see the VTLS VITAL page. Recent Articles
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