DigitalKoans

The DRAMA team has released a Solr plug-in for Fedora.

Here's a description of Solr from its home page:

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat.

The Fedora Commons has released the second beta version of Fedora 3.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Fedora 3.0 features the Content Model Architecture (CMA), an integrated structure for persisting and delivering the essential characteristics of digital objects in Fedora. . . . 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 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.

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France is engaged in the SPAR (A Distributed Archiving and Preservation System) project.

Here's an excerpt from the project's English home page:

After more than a year of study, BnF launched the SPAR project, true digital stack. Its design is based on international standards authoritative in the subject of the sustainability of digital information. In particular, SPAR respects the OAIS standard (ISO-14721:2003), reference model for an open archival information system. . . .

The SPAR project is much more than a simple stack of secure data.

• It makes multiple copies of the digital objects and provides continuous monitoring on the status of the hardware as well as the media containing the recorded files in order to anticipate new copies before a definitive loss.
• Through a precise and complete recognition of the formats of the ingested objects, it also guarantees the continuity of access by making the necessary transformations in case of the technological obsolescence of the access software. Hence, for example, when the JPEG image format will become obsolete, SPAR will be able to transform all the appropriate images in a new and more permanent format. . . .

SPAR is a system serving a community. It must guarantee that the documents given back haven't been modified. To this goal, SPAR marks each object with a digital signature. Moreover, to guarantee the access rights of the disseminated digital objects, SPAR uses a rights management system which calculates the usage licenses of the digital objects and applies the necessary restrictions depending on the user . . .

Read more about it at Bringing Seven Centuries into the Future: Bibliothèque Nationale de France: SPAR Analysis.

The Fedora Commons has published a new issue of HatCheck (vol. 1, no. 2). HatCheck is a "quarterly newsletter published by Fedora Commons that is provided by and for communities of Fedora users, developers, vendors and decision makers to facilitate the exchange of news, events, information and achievements."

The DSpace Foundation and the Fedora Commons have been recently investigating the possibility of joint collaboration.

Here's an excerpt from a Dspace-General message:

Over the last few weeks, we (Michele Kimpton and Sandy Payette) have been discussing the possibilities of our organizations collaborating. . . .

Over the past couple of weeks, we have had informal discussions with members of our communities, leaders in libraries and higher education, and Board members to get initial feedback as to whether they would support collaboration and the outcomes they would like to see as a result.

This past week, we convened members of both communities during the PASIG conference to get input and ideas regarding a collaboration.

Thus far, all of the stakeholders we have had the opportunity to talk with have been extremely supportive and excited about the possibility of the Fedora and DSpace communities working together in some capacity.

As a result of these discussions, we have agreed to move forward in our exploration of collaborative possibilities. Over the next several weeks our organizations will meet to plan the next steps in the process. Our intent is to bring together the ideas and expertise within both communities to come up with the most compelling issues to work on to best serve our communities.

The DRAMA team at Macquarie University has released version 1.3 release of Muradora.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Muradora is a web-based GUI for the popular Fedora repository, built using enterprise Java Spring and Struts 2 frameworks. Amongst the common features found in a typical repository such as search, browse, self-submission, and versioning supports, Muradora enables flexible access control for end users (based on the XACML standard), inter-domain authentication and federated identity (using Shibboleth implementation of the SAML standard), and multiple metadata schema management (via W3C XForms standard).

Notable features in 1.3 release:

• Faceted Search: By incorporating GSearch 2.0 with Solr support, users can perform faceted searches, i.e. one can now narrow down search results based on other categories.
• All-in-one installation: There is now an installation script for Unix/Linux systems which will install all the necessary components for Muradora. The complete package is called "muradora-allinone".
• RSS/Atom Feeds: Users can subscribe to collections (even non-public collections) and get notifications of new objects added to those collections.
• Thumbnail preview and gallery view: Thumbnails are now generated automatically for images. Thanks to the work by the MediaShelf team, one can browse and search using either the traditional listing view or with the gallery view.

Project reports from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2008 Research in Information Technology retreat are now available.

Here are selected project briefing reports:

• Fedora
• Open Archives Initiative-Object Reuse and Exchange
• OpenCollections
• Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research
• Sophie
• Visual Understanding Environment
• Zotero

The Fedora Commons has released version 2.2.2 of Fedora, which fixes 2.2.1 bugs and enhances the system's journaling and policy enforcement modules. (Version 3.0 Beta 1 is also available for testing.)

Oskar Grenholm of the National Library of Sweden has released oreprovider, an open-source Java application that "will let you disseminate digital objects stored in a Fedora repository as OAI-ORE Resource Maps."

In the announcement, he says:

The idea behind it all is that you have a Java web application (oreprovider.war) that, on the fly, will generate Resource Maps serialized as Atom feeds (using OAI4J) for objects in Fedora. All you have to do in Fedora is to add information in RELS-EXT what datastreams belongs to which Resource Map (exactly how to do this can be seen at the projects web page).