This is the sixth in a series of monthly updates on the Fedora Migration Paths and Tools project – please see last month’s post for a summary of the work completed up to that point. This project has been generously funded by the IMLS.

The Whitman College pilot team has updated their Islandora 8 instance to support Amazon S3 storage via Fedora’s native capabilities in order to comply with functional requirements. Additionally, the new Drupal 9 theme developed by Born Digital is being updated and configured to support various functional requirements related to display and browsing. This theme will be shared with the Islandora Foundation so it can be adopted and extended by others in the community.

An Alpha build of the migration validation utility is mostly complete and should be ready for the University of Virginia pilot team to begin testing by the end of the week. A list of tests the utility is capable of running is available on the wiki. The utility compares source Fedora 3 data with migrated Fedora 6 data and produces a HTML report. This report will also be available as a TSV file. 

Migration validation utility HTML output

Scott Prater from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has generously contributed his time and effort to a Fedora 3 to 6 API mapping document, which will help institutions map their client code interactions from their Fedora 3.x repositories to their new Fedora 6.x repositories. Once this document is complete it will be shared with the Fedora technical team before being shared more broadly as part of the migration toolkit.

Next month we hope to make progress on testing the new Whitman College Islandora 8 repository to ensure that functional requirements have been met. Where there are gaps we will assess how best to address them. Meanwhile, the University of Virginia pilot team will use the validation utility to verify that their Fedora 6.x content has been faithfully migrated from their Fedora 3.x repository before loading the data into a Fedora 6.0 Beta instance to test against their functional requirements.

Stay tuned for future updates!

The post Fedora Migration Paths and Tools Project Update: March 2021 appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Welcome to the second episode in a series of blog posts aimed at introducing you to some of the wonderful members within our community who work tirelessly to advocate, educate and promote Fedora and other community-supported programs like ours. At Fedora, we are strong because of our people and without individuals like this advocating for continued development we would not be where we are today. 

Fedora is an open-source, community-supported program funded entirely by membership contributions. Without our members, we would not be able to support the preservation of the vital content contained within the repositories of our users around the world. Find out how you can help. Learn more and become a member today!

This week we would like to introduce you to Rosalyn Metz and Robin Ruggaber, two former chairs of our Steering and Leadership Governance groups.

Rosalyn Metz, Associate Dean, Library Technology & Digital Strategies, Emory University Libraries

Tell me your name, where you work and what your title is.

“I’m Rosalyn Metz – Associate Dean, Library Technology & Digital Strategies at Emory University Libraries.”

How are you involved with Fedora Governance?

“I’m less involved than I was previously as the chair-elect and the chair. Right now I’m a member of Fedora Steering and I participate on the Fedora Governance and Business Model Vision and Strategy Group.”

How long have you been involved with Fedora? How long have you been involved in Fedora Governance?

“My first interaction with Fedora was in 2009 or 2010 when I was working at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. A colleague in the archives was interested in preserving the college’s records and we thought Fedora might be a good solution to the problem. I installed it and played around a little, but ultimately the colleague chose to focus on paper records first and we put the idea on the back burner. Fast forward 4 years and while working at Stanford I attended my first Fedora meeting at PASIG in Karlsruhe, Germany and I’ve participated in the community as time has allowed ever since.”

 What compels you to continue to advocate for Fedora? Why do you think it’s important

“I believe digital preservation is a series of activities organizations undertake to ensure content remains safe for now and into the future. At the same time I believe preserving content in software that will outlive any single company or organization helps to ensure our content can do the same. Fedora helps organizations serve both of those functions and is a natural complement to any digital preservation plan.”

What is the coolest thing you’ve done with your repository?

“Emory University Libraries exposed much of the information contained within Fedora in our Hyrax-based repository marrying digital preservation with our access repository.

If you could be any animal, what would it be and why?

“My cat. She’s a prolific hunter catching and bringing home all manner of creatures as gifts, sometimes multiple gifts a day! At the same time she manages to spend most of her day lounging about on soft cushy blankets. Oh to be so productive with so little effort.”

Robin Ruggaber, Director of Strategic Technology Partnerships & Initiatives, University of Virginia

Tell me your name, where you work and what your title is.

“I’m Robin Ruggaber – Director of Strategic Technology Partnerships & Initiatives at the University of Virginia Libraries.”

How are you involved with Fedora Governance?

“I am currently a member of Fedora Steering & Fedora Leaders, serving on the Communication, Outreach, Marketing, and Community Strategy Group. I am also working on the IMLS funded project Fedora Migration Paths & Tools with UVA serving as a pilot project partner.”

How long have you been involved with Fedora? How long have you been involved in Fedora Governance?

“The UVA Library was one of the original implementation partners back in 2001. I got involved in the Fedora Futures project in 2012 and have since worked in Steering, Leaders and various strategy groups.”

What compels you to continue to advocate for Fedora? Why do you think it’s important?

“I am fully committed to preserving cultural heritage and making knowledge openly accessible. Fedora offers a preservation-focused repository that is based on standards and is flexible enough to stand alone or support an array of digital management technologies (Samvera, Islandora, etc). I see Fedora as a strong foundational element to any digital library system architecture.”

If you could be any animal, what would it be and why?

“The tawny Jaguar which chose me so it simply is. Thanks!”

Thank you again to Rosalyn and Robin for taking the time let us learn a little bit more about their stories and why they choose to continue to contribute to the Fedora community. If you would like more information about Fedora Governance you can find more information on our wiki here.

And for additional information on how you can support community-supported programs like Fedora, please consider becoming a Member by clicking here.

The post Meet the Members – Episode 2 appeared first on Duraspace.org.

This is the fifth in a series of monthly updates on the Fedora Migration Paths and Tools project – please see last month’s post for a summary of the work completed up to that point. This project has been generously funded by the IMLS.

A couple project-related presentations will be delivered at upcoming conferences: Paige Morfitt from Whitman College will present with David Wilcox on Mapping Metadata: Cleaning and controlling fields to improve migrations on March 24th at the online Code4Lib Conference. A more general update on Fedora 6.0 and the work we’ve been doing on the grant project will take place at the upcoming CNI Spring Meeting.

Meanwhile the Whitman College pilot team completed an initial installation of Islandora using Drupal 9 and an Alpha build of Fedora 6.0. This instance has been populated with test content so the team can begin reviewing against the spreadsheet of functional requirements to determine any gaps and how to address them. At the same time, test migrations using real data will begin using the Islandora Workbench tool. The workflow for using this tool will be documented so others can follow a similar path.

The University of Virginia pilot has been on hold while work on Fedora 6.0 and the migration validation utility progresses. Changes between the Alpha and (soon to be released) Beta versions of Fedora 6.0 will require another run of the migration utility, after which the data will be validated before being tested with the latest build of Fedora 6.0.

With the impending release of Fedora 6.0 Beta we are quickly approaching production release, which is a prerequisite for the completion of the pilots. Over the next couple months we will validate the UVA migrated data, test this data in Fedora 6.0, and ensure front-end services have been updated accordingly. At the same time, we will run test migrations of different data types in the Whitman College Islandora instance while going through the list of functional requirements and making a plan for addressing any gaps.

Stay tuned for next month’s updates!

The post Fedora Migration Paths and Tools Project Update: February 2021 appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts aimed at introducing you to some of the movers and shakers who work tirelessly to advocate, educate and promote Fedora and other community-supported programs like ours. At Fedora, we are strong because of our people and without individuals like this advocating for continued development we would not be where we are today. As you may or may not know, our Steering Governance group is made up of elected members who serve to provide project oversight and ensure the priorities of the Leadership Group and member institutions are being met. In today’s “Meet the Members” post, I would like to introduce you to our Steering Group Chair and Chair-Elect – Este Pope & Tim Shearer.

Tell me your name, where you work and what your title is.

“Este Pope. I am the head of Digital Programs at the Amherst College Library.”

How are you involved with Fedora Governance?

“I’m the chair of Fedora Steering and Leaders Groups this year. I’m also a co-chair of the Communication, Outreach, Marketing and Community Sub-group (we proudly have the longest name amongst the sub-groups).”

How long have you been involved with Fedora? How long have you been involved in Fedora Governance?

“I’ve been involved in Fedora and the Leaders and Steering Groups for four years. I’ve been a fan of Fedora since the early 2000’s.”

 What compels you to continue to advocate for Fedora? Why do you think it’s important

“Open source software. Academy-led software development. The opportunity to embed values of libraries, museums, galleries, and archives into the infrastructure we use to provide access and support preservation of digital assets from our institutions. We are a global community of colleagues with a shared investment and responsibility to promote long-term sustainability. And we have phenomenal and committed partners at LYRASIS and on the governance and committers groups.”

What is the coolest thing you’ve done with your repository?

“I’m really proud of all the college history materials we’ve been adding to celebrate Amherst’s bicentennial this year. With so much remote learning happening, having access to these materials in digital form is especially important and cool. The archives are supporting work by Amherst College to research the racial history of the institution as part of our anti-racism plan, and we are finding many materials in our repository that support this research.”

https://www.amherst.edu/library

If you could choose one super power, what would it be and why?

“I think I’d be able to pause time or speed myself up temporarily to get a bunch of things done quickly, but no one would notice, and it wouldn’t age me or tire me out. I could see a lot of potential uses for that superpower both personally and for the world. It would almost be like I was a human supercomputer.”

Tell me your name, where you work and what your title is.

“I’m Tim Shearer, Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies &IT at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries.”

How are you involved with Fedora Governance?

“I am currently a member of Fedora Leaders, Fedora Steering and am chair-elect of Steering.”

How long have you been involved with Fedora? How long have you been involved in Fedora Governance?

“UNC Chapel Hill Libraries have been using Fedora as core technology for the campus institutional repository since 2010. Since then Fedora’s footprint has grown significantly as part of our preservation program. In addition to Carolina’s scholarship, Fedora now undergirds most library-managed digital objects, largely special collections. We have a long and rewarding history not only of using Fedora, but of contributing to the code base and broader community.

I was first elected to Fedora Leaders in 2014 and have been a part of governance for most of the sixteen years since. As is not uncommon for folks new to a community filled with names I’d only heard, I was pretty tentative in those first years. I wondered if I really had the background and experience to bring a meaningful voice to a global open source software project. What I found was a wonderful and welcoming community. One focused on collective problem solving and committed to making a difference. One that continues to evolve, and which is strengthened by new and diverse voices. (This means you!)”

What compels you to continue to advocate for Fedora? Why do you think it’s important?

“Narrowly, The University Libraries use Fedora as one of our enterprise systems. I feel it is important both to represent our use cases to the project and to contribute our expertise and energy back to the community. It is a feedback loop that strengthens our repository and preservation programs and at the same time (one hopes) strengthens the project.

Fedora is of direct benefit to my institution.

More broadly, Fedora holds a unique position in the larger repository world. Most off-the-shelf solutions serve a limited number of use cases. Fedora is essentially object neutral, data model neutral, and it scales. The University Libraries have large and complex collections representing the messiness of humans as trapped in artifacts. Fedora is a fundamental tool for stewarding, preserving, and expressing this record in ways that we hope are authentic. And while it is extremely flexible, Fedora is also part of an information system. One that holds promise to enable unmediated computational access to objects and metadata. We are trying to build toward an ever more robust future to help students, researchers, and scholars use our collections in ways that support current and future methodologies and tools.  

Fedora fulfills a unique role in the complex repository ecosystem.

Finally, Fedora is a great example of academy-led software development. There are real costs to this model. Community is messy, slow, and can become easily distracted. Sustainable financing of open source is challenging. But we find ourselves in a world where scholarly output and systems are being swallowed up by an increasingly small number of corporate entities. These companies own not only the research, but also the promise of controlling and selling predictive analytics back to the academy, companies, and governments. The academy, and the global citizens who pay for it, deserve transparent access to the code that stores scholarship and the algorithms that analyze it. We must have a voice in ensuring that systems respect privacy and are developed and used ethically. Additionally, institutions need systems that provide a bridge to the future. Too often rather than a bridge, we find ourselves in a foggy cul-de-sac where the only exit strategy is a hefty check…and the guarantee of a new license agreement that locks in annual increases. I am passionate about doing what I can to ensure there are alternatives. Open source community driven development is one of the tools to keep the door from being closed, and then locked. 

Fedora is part of a broader effort to support democratic access to the record of humanity.”

What is the coolest thing you’ve done with your repository?

“The answer depends on how you define cool. I get excited about some things that are pretty deep in the stack such as our work on bulkrax and longleaf. But over this last year we have added nearly thirty thousand open access articles by UNC Chapel Hill scholars to the Carolina Digital Repository with more to come soon. This feels particularly significant on a campus that adopted an Open Access Policy and entrusted the Libraries to build and manage its institutional repository.  

It is important to acknowledge that all this progress is due to the efforts of amazingly talented and passionate folks that I am fortunate enough to have had as colleagues. If you follow links, please take a moment to learn the names of the folks responsible for the work.”

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why?

“To provide well-resourced, freely available, universally inclusive education. Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I believe that investment in education relates directly to the curve of that arc.”

I want to take a moment and thank both Este and Tim for participating in today’s post. We look forward to the progress the team is making toward a Fedora 6.0 Production Release and look forward to your continued involvement within the community.

If you would like more information about Fedora Governance you can find it here. And for additional information on how you can support community-supported programs like Fedora, please consider becoming a Member by clicking here.

The post Meet the Members appeared first on Duraspace.org.

This is the fourth in a series of monthly updates on the Fedora Migration Paths and Tools project – please see last month’s post for a summary of the work completed up to that point. This project has been generously funded by the IMLS.

The grant team has been focused on completing an initial build of a validation utility, which will allow implementers to compare their migrated content with the original Fedora 3.x source material to verify that everything has been migrated successfully. A testable version of this tool is expected to be completed in the coming weeks, at which point the University of Virginia pilot team will test and provide feedback on the utility.

The University of Virginia team has completed a full migration of their legacy Fedora 3.2.1 repository. They also recently contributed improvements to the Fedora AWS Deployer which have been merged into the codebase. The team is now awaiting a testable version of the validation utility so they can validate their migrated content before moving on to testing this content in a newly installed Fedora 6.0 instance.

The Whitman College pilot team has completed their metadata remediation and mapping work. Their process and lessons learned will be shared in a presentation at the upcoming Code4Lib conference. Meanwhile, Islandora 8 is currently being tested with an Alpha build of Fedora 6.0, which will be used as the basis for migration testing for the Whitman College pilot. Work is currently being done in parallel to install Islandora 8 using ISLE and complete work on a new theme. Due to the impending end-of-life date of Drupal 8 the team decided to proceed directly to Drupal 9, and the theme needed to be updated accordingly. Fortunately, the transition from Drupal 8 to 9 is relatively minor.

Next month we plan to use the validation utility to validate the University of Virginia migration before moving on to testing the migrated data in Fedora 6.0 and updating the application as needed. For the Whitman College pilot, once the Islandora 8 with Fedora 6.0 installation is complete we will be able to run a series of test migrations and update the utilities and application as necessary in order to satisfy functional requirements.

Stay tuned for future updates!

The post Fedora Migration Paths and Tools Project Update: January 2021 appeared first on Duraspace.org.