NOW AVAILABLE: Fedora 4 Production Release—Not Your Dad’s Fedora Groundbreaking
new capabilities make Fedora 4 the repository platform of choice for right now
and into the future.Winchester, MA The international Fedora repository
community and DuraSpace are very pleased to announce the production release of
Fedora 4. This significant release signals the effectiveness of an
international and complex community source project in delivering a modern
repository platform with features that meet or exceed current use cases in the
management of institutional digital assets. Fedora 4 features include vast
improvements in scalability, linked data capabilities, research data support,
modularity, ease of use and more.Fedora 4 features were collaboratively chosen
and developed by a virtual team of developers and stakeholders from around the
globe. With DuraSpace support this committed team has ensured that Fedora
Repository software will meet the emerging needs of the academic research
community now and for the next decade.• DOWNLOAD Fedora 4:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Downloads• RELEASE NOTES:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Fedora+4.0.0+Release+Notes•
DOCUMENTATION:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA40/Fedora+4.0+Documentation• VIDEO:
http://youtu.be/Mg_QFDAspoE
Community KudosRobin Ruggaber, Chair of the Fedora Steering Group and Library
Chief Technology Officer at the University of Virginia commented on Fedora’s
achievements: “The success of the Fedora community today is rooted in the way
it operates. The community members govern, fund, shape and produce the solution
to meet global repositories’ needs and performance requirements. The
development is based on what product owners need and is managed so that
everyone in the community can contribute without individually exhausting human
or financial resources. We are maximizing the power of distributed development
and ownership and are rewarded with a sustainable, low risk, moderate cost
solution.”
Stefano Cossu, Director of Application Services, Collections at The Art
Institute of Chicago offered his reasons for adopting Fedora 4: “We have
searched far and wide for a system that could store our large and diverse
collection of art objects and their related assets, integrate in a complex
architecture of legacy applications and data sources, and make our digital
resources available in a wide variety of ways.
We have adopted Fedora 4 very early for its scalability and flexibility in all
its aspects, its adhesion to solid standards, the project's long-sighted goals
and the extremely talented and motivated community around it.”
Fedora 4 support for linked data—what it means for youThe broad concept of
linked data is the idea that the semantic web can connect everything. Fedora 4
makes that concept real.
With built-in linked data support Fedora 4 offers the ability to develop
discovery tools in compliance with the W3C Linked Data Platform specification.
The long-held linked data promise of broad and deeply faceted discovery on the
open web is based on the concept that information can be exchanged using the
resource description framework (RDF) as a standard model. The ability to share
data openly and take advantage of the semantic web means that content is not
“inside a silo” that can only be discovered and re-used if repository software
adheres to standardization and interoperability. With Fedora 4 the “Web is a
repository” providing new kinds of digital collections and data sources for
services and applications.
Scalability—how big is bigAs larger data sets, larger files, research data and
multimedia use cases have emerged in the community Fedora 4 is set to meet the
challenge of improved scalability. Fedora 4 repositories can manage millions
and millions of digital files along with extremely large files of any type
running on top of back-end storage systems. This means that petabytes of
storage are available to you because Fedora can potentially operate on top of
any storage system via a pluggable, expandable connector framework.
Flexibility and extensibility—plugging into what worksThe strength of Fedora
repository software lies in it’s native flexibility and extensibility. Fedora
4 architecture builds on a lightweight core model with multiple, pluggable
components and a standard set of robust APIs.
SecurityFedora 4 provides a pluggable, extensible security framework capable of
supporting a variety of authorization systems. Two initial systems have been
implemented—role-based authorization and XACML. A third, based on the emerging
W3C Web Access Control standard, is currently being planned. By decoupling
security from the repository core, Fedora 4 supports existing authorization
standards rather than maintaining a custom security framework.
ClusteringClustering connects multiple Fedora 4 nodes in a network providing
horizontal repository scaling for high-availability use cases. By configuring
two or more replicated Fedora 4 nodes to run behind a load-balancer, you can
evenly distribute web traffic between the nodes to maximize performance.
Fedora 3.8–a solid release to cap off the 3.0 lineFedora 3.8 has always been
planned as a part of Fedora 4 development. The aim was to cap off the 3.0 line
with a solid release for the user community. The Fedora 3.8 release features an
improved REST API interaction with correct headers returned for better caching
along with performance improvements and bug fixes.
• DOWNLOAD Fedora 3.8: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA38/Downloads•
DOCUMENTATION:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA38/Fedora+3.8+Documentation
The Fedora 4 Community of ContributorsMembers
Arizona State University Libraries
Brown University Library
Case Western Reserve University Libraries
Charles Darwin University
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL)
Columbia University Library
Cornell University
Docuteam GmbH
Durham University
Duke University Libraries
FIZ Karlsruhe
George Washington University
Ghent University Library
Gothenburg University Library
Indiana University
ICPSR
Johns Hopkins University Libraries
La Trobe University
London School of Economics & Political Science
LYRASIS
Macquarie University
National Library of Medicine
National Library of Wales / Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru
National Research Council of Canada
Northeastern University Libraries
Northwestern University Libraries
Ohio State
Oregon State
Pennsylvania State University
Princeton University
Rutgers University Libraries
Smithsonian Institution, Office of Research Infomation Services
Stanford University
State and University Library of Denmark
The Art Institute of Chicago
Tufts University
University of Alberta
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of Cincinnati
University of Connecticut Libraries
University of Hull
University of Lausanne
University of Manitoba
University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
University of New South Wales
University of Notre Dame
University of North Carolina
University of Oklahoma Libraries
University of Oxford
University of Pittsburgh
University of Prince Edward Island
University of Rochester Libraries
University of Texas Libraries Austin
University of Toronto
University of Virginia
University of Wisconsin
University of York
Uppsala University Library
Yale University
York University
Contributors
Sprint Developers
Adam Soroka (University of Virginia)
Andrew Woods (DuraSpace)
Anusha Ranganathan (University of Oxford)
Benjamin Armintor (Columbia University)
Ben Pennell (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Chris Beer (Stanford University)
Eddie Shin (Digital Curation Experts)
Eric James (Yale University)
Esme Cowles (University of California, San Diego)
Giulia Hill (University of California, Berkeley)
Greg Jansen (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Jared Whiklo (University of Manitoba)
Jonathan Green (discoverygarden inc.)
Jon Roby (University of Manitoba)
Kevin S. Clarke (University of California, Los Angeles)
Longshou Situ (University of California, San Diego)
Michael Durbin (University of Virginia)
Mike Daines (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed (University of Maryland)
Nigel Banks (discoverygarden inc.)
Osman Din (Yale University)
Paul Pound (University of Prince Edward Island)
Scott Prater (University of Wisconsin)
Vincent Nguyen (Centers for Disease Control)
Ye Cao (Max Planck Digital Library
Yinlin Chen (Virginia Tech)
Yuqing Jiang (discoverygarden inc.)
Community Developers
Aaron Coburn (Amherst College)
Chris Colvar (Indiana University)
Frank Asseg (FIZ Karlsruhe)
Kai Sternad (Independant)
Nikhil Trivedi (Art Institute of Chicago)
Rob Sanderson (Stanford University)
Robin Taylor (University of Edinburgh)
How Does DuraSpace Help?DuraSpace (duraspace.org) works collaboratively with
organizations that use Fedora to advance the design, development and
sustainability of the project. As a non-profit, DuraSpace provides business
support services that include technical leadership, sustainability planning,
fundraising, community development, marketing and communications,
collaborations and strategic partnerships and administration.
About FedoraFedora (fedorarepository.org) is an open source project that
provides flexible, extensible and durable digital object management software.
First released in 2004, it has hundreds of adopters worldwide, with deep roots
in the research, scientific, intellectual and cultural heritage communities. It
is supported by its community of users, and stewarded by DuraSpace.
