Mellon Grant lets Libraries and Computer Scientists join forces to create
new solution for Digital Information Management
For Immediate Release, August 12, 2003
Contact:
Ronda Grizzle
Technical Coordinator, Fedora Project
rgrizzle@virginia.edu, 434-924-3965
Charlotte Morford
Director of Communications, UVa Library
cwm6z@virginia.edu, 434-924-4254
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/.
###
|
