[Sigdl-l] Press Release -- Fedora v.1.1 Released

[Leslie Johnston]

Please excuse cross-posting.

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MELLON GRANT LETS LIBRARIES AND COMPUTER SCIENTISTS JOIN FORCES TO CREATE 
NEW SOLUTION FOR DIGITAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Charlottesville, VA-Thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon 
Foundation, the University of Virginia Library announces the release of an 
open-source digital object repository management system. The Fedora 
Project, a joint effort of the University of Virginia and Cornell 
University, has now made available the first version of a system based on 
the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture, originally 
developed at Cornell.

Fedora repositories can provide the foundation for a variety of information 
management schemes, not least among them digital library systems. At the 
University of Virginia, Fedora is being used to build a large-scale digital 
library that will soon have millions of digital resources of all media and 
content types. It is also currently being tested by a consortium of 
institutions that include the Library of Congress, Northwestern University, 
Tufts University, and others. They are building testbeds drawn from their 
own digital collections that they will use to evaluate the software and 
give feedback to the project.

This first version of the software is designed to support a repository 
containing one million objects using freely available software. It fully 
implements the Fedora architecture, provides the first version of a 
graphical user interface to manage the repository, and provides facilities 
to create and ingest batches of objects. The software has the following key 
features:

    --Management API (API-M) - defines an interface for administering the 
repository. It includes operations necessary for clients to create and 
maintain digital objects and their components. API-M is implemented as a 
SOAP-enabled web service.

    --Access API (API-A) - defines an interface for accessing digital 
objects stored in the repository. It includes operations necessary for 
clients to perform disseminations on objects in the repository and to 
discover information about an object using object reflection. API-A is 
implemented as a SOAP-enabled web service.

    --Access-Lite API (API-A-Lite) - defines a streamlined version of the 
Fedora Access Service that is implemented as an HTTP-enabled web service.

    --Datastreams - Objects in a repository may contain content and 
metadata (i.e. datastreams) that physically reside inside the repository or 
outside the repository. The Fedora repository system supports content of 
any MIME type.

    --XML Submission and Storage - Fedora digital objects conform to an 
extension of the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), 
described at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/. Objects can be submitted 
to the repository in XML format.  Also, digital objects are persistently 
stored in the repository as XML files. The Fedora extension of the METS 
schema can be found at 
http://www.fedora.info/definitions/1/0/mets-fedora-ext.xsd.

    --Versioning - The Fedora repository system includes the infrastructure 
to support versioning of digital objects and their components. This feature 
will be available in Release 1.2, projected for Fall 2003.

    --Access Control and Authentication - Release 1.0 includes a simple 
form of access control to provide access restrictions based on IP address. 
IP range restriction is supported in both the Management and Access APIs. 
In addition, the Management API is protected by HTTP Basic Authentication. 
Release 2.0 will provide Shibboleth-based authentication and authorization, 
XML-based policy expression, and enforcement of fine-grained access control 
policies.

    --Disseminators - Digital objects can be associated with a set of 
behaviors and a service that runs those behaviors. This provides an 
extensible mechanism for transforming or presenting the object's digital 
content.

    --Default Disseminator - The Default Disseminator is a built-in 
internal disseminator on every object that provides a system-defined 
behavior mechanism for disseminating the basic contents of an object.

    --Searching - Selected system metadata fields are indexed along with 
the primary Dublin Core record for each object. The Fedora repository 
system provides a search interface for both full text and field-specific 
queries across these metadata fields.

    --OAI Metadata Harvesting Provider - The OAI Protocol for Metadata 
Harvesting is a standard for sharing metadata across repositories. Every 
Fedora digital object has a primary Dublin Core record that conforms to the 
schema at: http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd. This metadata is 
accessible using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, v2.0.

    --Batch Utility - The Fedora repository system includes a Batch Utility 
as part of the Management client that enables the mass creation and loading 
of data objects.

Fedora is being made available as an open-source product under a Mozilla 
Public License. For more information and to download the software, visit 
http://www.fedora.info/.

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Ronda A. Grizzle
Technical Coordinator, Fedora Project
Digital Library Research & Development
(voice) 434-924-3965
(fax) 434-924-1431