arXiv is the primary daily information source for hundreds of thousands of researchers in many areas of physics and related fields. Its users include the world’s most prominent researchers in science, including 53 Physics Nobel Laureates, 31 Fields Medalists and 55 MacArthur Fellows, as well as people in countries with limited access to scientific materials. The famously reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted the proof for the 100-year-old Poincaré Conjecture solely in arXiv.

Journalists also use the repository extensively to prepare articles for the general public about newly released scientific results. It has long stood at the forefront of the open-access movement and served as the model for many other initiatives, including the National Institute of Health‚s PubMedCentral repository, and the many institutional DSpace repositories. arXiv is currently ranked the No. 1 repository in the world by the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

“arXiv began its operations before the World Wide Web, search engines, online commerce and all the rest, but nonetheless anticipated many components of current Web 2.0‚ methodology,” said Cornell professor Paul Ginsparg, arXiv‚s creator. “It continues to play a leading role at the forefront of new models for scientific communication.”

arXiv encompasses publications in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and quantitative biology. Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. A team of 113 volunteer moderators from around the world screen submissions and recommend whether they should be included in the repository.

More than 200,000 articles are downloaded from arXiv each week by about 400,000 users, and its 118,000 registered submitters live in nearly 200 countries, including Suriname, Sudan and Iraq. Fifteen countries host mirrors of the main site, which is located on Cornell‚s campus in Ithaca, N.Y.

“It represents an incredible model for scholarly communication that transcends borders, publishers and time,” said Anne R. Kenney, Cornell’s Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. “We bring operational stability and a demonstrated track record of stewardship to this invaluable open-access resource.”

Ginsparg developed arXiv in 1991, when he was working for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. When Ginsparg came to Cornell as a faculty member in 2001, the repository came with him and is now a collaboration between Cornell University Library and Cornell‚s Information Science Program. The Library maintains the repository; information science handles research and development.

The repository is continually evolving, adding links to other repositories and RSS feeds. New facilities are being developed to ease the submission process for authors and support the addition of articles from conference management systems. The new query-and-retrieval interface allows others to build additional services onto arXiv, such as an iPhone interface.

“We’re excited to not only sustain and grow arXiv, but also to make it an integral part of the global scholarly communications infrastructure,” said arXiv manager Simeon Warner, who has been working on the project for nearly a decade.

See arXiv.org for more details.

An outstanding panel of presenters will discuss thelegal and access issues as well as various IR platforms and models that will provide attendees with the means to make informed decisions regarding the introduction of an institutional repository.

Speakers:

Greg Tananbaum,
Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content & Academia
Opening and Closing presentations

Georgia Harper
Scholarly Communications Advisor
University of Texas at Austin Libraries

Leah Vanderjagt
Digital Repository Services Librarian
University of Alberta Libraries

Marilyn Billings
Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Jessica Branco Colati
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries
Project Director, Alliance Digital Repository

Bob Gerrity
Director of Library Systems
Boston College Libraries

Robert Tansley
Engineer
Google, Inc.

 Advance registration will open on October 1, 2008 at the ALA conference website. 

ORE wishes to thank David Flanders and other organizers of RepoCamp 2008 (held on 25 July 2008 at the Library of Congress, see D-Lib report) for coordinating the challenge; to Savas Parastatidis, David Flanders, Rob Sanderson and Tim DiLauro for judging the challenge; and to Microsoft Research for sponsorship.

This new service will provide a high performance method of distributing content to end users, and will give customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections. The goal is to create a content delivery service that:

•Lets developers and businesses get started easily - there are no minimum fees and no commitments. You will only pay for what you actually use.
•Is simple and easy to use - a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
•Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 - this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.
•Has a global presence - we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.

You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.

The service is being tested with a small group of private beta customers. If you’d like to be notified when we launch, please let Amazon know by clicking here.

About TEI

Since 1994 the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a global non-profit membership organization composed of academic institutions, research projects, and scholars, has provided a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. The TEI Guidelines specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. The most popular section of the Guidelines is entitled “Gentle Introduction to XML.”

It’s been an exciting summer with the release of Fedora 3.0, Mulgara 2.0, and the kickoff of the new collaboration of Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation.

In July, Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation, and I stood on the steps of the Library of Congress to shake hands as a symbol of our commitment to collaboration. This is a very exciting development for our organizations and our communities for several reasons. First, our communities will benefit from our efforts to bring the DSpace and Fedora repository systems closer together and make them more interoperable. We have heard from many users that the ideal solution for them would be to have the “best of both” and we are committed to determining the best strategies to meet this requirement. Second, our non-profit organizations will benefit from the strategic alliance we have formed. Both the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons are situated in an exciting and dynamic context that is influenced by both technical and social forces. With many new players in the terrain that might loosely be described as “repositories” we believe that together DSpace and Fedora can continue to provide a unique value proposition over the long haul. We both have strong communities, successful open source products, deep understanding of the challenges of digital preservation and scholarly communication, and close relationships with universities, libraries, scholars, and scientists. Working together, we will continue to serve our mission by leveraging new technologies and by developing new strategies for integrating repositories in Web-based knowledge spaces and emerging cyberinfrastructure. We look forward to lots of community participation as refine our ideas and translate them into software development plans. Check out the press release about our collaboration and stay tuned for more information over the next few months.

Fedora 3.0 Milestone

Both the core Fedora development team and committers and contributors from the wider community have done a great job in delivering Fedora 3.0. I consider this an important milestone for several reasons: (1) it streamlines the core Fedora repository service, (2) it introduces the first in a series of new features that will make the Fedora repository integrate better with new and emerging Web technologies and standards, and (3) it provides a simple starting point for creating and storing “content models” that describe different genre of digital objects.

I’ll mention a few things about better integration with the Web. With feedback from our community, we are focused on providing new lightweight interfaces for the Fedora repository that make it much easier to integrate with Web applications. Also, we would like to expose the repository in a manner that promotes interoperability using common Web protocols and formats. In Fedora 3.0, we took our first steps by introducing a new REST interface for managing the repository and supporting ingest/export using the Atom syndication format. In the next six months we will kick off a number of new innovative projects to improve the repository fit within the Web, both from the perspective of front-end access to the repository, and from the perspective of integrating Web storage providers at the back-end of the repository.

Here’s my simple explanation of the new “Content Model Architecture (CMA) unveiled in Fedora 3.0…. Given that you can register a description of what a particular type of digital object should look like (for example a “book” digital object), it’s a lot easier to take the next step, which is to assert which digital objects in the repository conform to the model. With Fedora’s new CMA features, the relationships between digital objects and their content models can be easily recorded via RDF. At a minimum, this enables you to “round up all the suspects” during times when you would like to find all the “book” objects for maintenance or migration. Better yet, you can use content models as the basis for which transformative services can be dynamic associated with digital objects.

Mulgara Semantic Triplestore

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to the new release of the Mulgara semantic triplestore, whose development is supported by Fedora Commons. This week Mulgara 2.0.5 was released. The new Mulgara 2.0 line is a major milestone that continues to advance the state of this very powerful RDF triplestore in open source. With the release of Mulgara 2.0 we now have SPARQL query support, plus an array of new features that greatly improve reliability and scalability. Check out the details at the Mulgara web site.

Repository Fringe 2008, funded by JISC and hosted by the University of Edinburgh, was held from August 31 - September 1. Researchers were on hand to exchange ideas on the best way’s for repository data to be collected, stored and made accessible.

The keynote presentation was given by Dorothea Salo, Digital Repository Librarian, University of Wisconsin, and Caveat Lector author, focused on the failure of the ‘build it and they will come’ approach to institutional repository provision (’Le IR, c’est mort. Vive le IR!’). Other presentations took up the theme of radically rethinking ideas and assumptions about what repositories are.

Highlights of the all-day meeting include a talk by Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, and an early morning session for Fedora newbies, to help them with setting up and running Fedora. If you have an interesting Fedora-based project, we have some time slots available for short(!) presentations.

The full agenda for the day and other details can be found on the Fedora Commons Wiki here. The event is free. If you intend to participate, please let us know by sending an email to either Matthias Razum (matthias.razum@fiz-karlsruhe.de) or Kåre Fiedler Christiansen (kfc@STATSBIBLIOTEKET.DK).

Fixes:

• Removed a symlink that documented javacc as version 4.0. A poorly written task was trying to pick up this link as a real file, which doesn’t work on Windows.
• Fixed the namespace map in the RDF/XML writer so it can’t accidentally use a generated URI in an export.

Cleanup:

• Removed unnecessary config files from the mulgara-core distribution.

New Features:

• Created a cut-down default config file for the mulgara-core distribution.

For full details see the release notes at:
http://mulgara.org/release.html#v2.0.5

You can download Mulgara 2.0.5 at:
http://mulgara.org/download.html

Overview of New Features in Fedora 3.0 Release

-Content Model Architecture – Provides a model-driven approach for persisting and delivering the essential characteristics of digital content in Fedora-Fedora REST API
– A new API that exposes a subset of the Access and Management API using a RESTful Web interface contributed by MediaShelf
-Mulgara Support – Fedora supports the Mulgara 2.0 Semantic Triplestore replacing Kowari
-Migration Utility– Provides an update utility to convert existing collections for Content Model Architecture compatibility
-Relational Index Simplification – The Fedora schema was simplified making changes easier without having to reload the database and significantly increasing scalability
-Dynamic Behaviors– Objects may be added or removed dynamically from the system moving system checks into run-time errors
-Error Reporting– Provides improved run-time error details-Multiple Owner as a CSV String; Enables using a CSV string as ownerID and in XACML policies
-Java 6 Compatibility– Fedora may be optionally compiled using Java 6 while retaining support for Java Enterprise Edition 1.5 deployments-Relationships API – API-M has been extended to enable adding, removing, and discovering RDF relations between Fedora objects
-Revised Fedora Object XML Schemas – The new schemas are simpler, supporting the CMA and removing Disseminators-Atom Support; Fedora objects can now be imported and exported in the Atom format
-Messaging Support– Integrates JMS messaging for sending notification of important events-Validation Framework – Provides system operators a way to validate all or part of their repository, based on content models-3.0
-Compatible Service Releases – New versions of the OAI Provider and GSearch services are compatible with Fedora 3.0. The GSearch release also enables messaging support for GSearch, which allows for more robust and seamless integration with the Fedora repository.
-Many new enhancements–see the Release Notes here.

The Fedora CMA builds on the Fedora architecture simplifies 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.

Please continue to contribute your observations and comments to fedora-commons-developers@lists.sourceforge.net or fedora-commons-users@lists.sourceforge.net. Fedora 2.2.2 will continue to be supported for production repositories.

Acknowledgements

The release of Fedora 3.0 is made possible by a collaborative partnership with community developers and the Fedora core software development team that include: Chris Wilper (Fedora Commons), Eddie Shin (Fedora Commons), Bill Branan (Fedora Commons), Paul Gearon (Fedora Commons and Mulgara), Robert Haschart (Fedora Commons), Ross Wayland (Fedora Commons), Aaron Birkland (Fedora Commons and National Science Digital Library), Jim Blake (Fedora Commons and National Science Digital Library), Matt Zumwalt (API-M LITE, Media Shelf), Gert Schmeltz Pedersen (GSearch), Cuong Tran (API-M LITE, Digital Innovation South Africa), Pradeep Krishnan, Ronald Tschalär, Bill Arrow, Jim Paul and many others.

About Fedora Commons

In 2007 Fedora Commons was established as the permanent home of Fedora open source software which is a robust, integrated, repository platform that enables storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content. Fedora has been downloaded 25,000 times in the last year, and is used by over 125 national libraries, institutions, and businesses worldwide to do more with their digital collections, enable long-term preservation of digital assets, build on a flexible and extensible, modular architecture, keep control of their data, and participate in Fedora’s innovative community. To find out about Fedora organizations, institutions and projects please visit the Fedora Commons Community Registry.

Our initial push in this direction is to concentrate on community building around particular solution areas, for which complete applications could be built on top of Fedora. We think of these applications as “solution bundles” implying that there is a complete end-user package that bundles software created externally with a specific set of Fedora Commons Framework services into an integrated application that addresses a particular use case of the solution area. These communities would be intended to bring together software that is already developed in each of these areas, as well as to organize new efforts to develop software.

Rather than take a top-down approach to organizing communities, we plan to act as the catalyst for self-organizing communities. Taking lessons from others who are applying research about emergence in complex systems to social systems, as well as developments happening all around us in Web 2.0 space, we are starting with four solution communities. These include:

· Data Curation

· Open-access Publishing

· Preservation and Archiving

· Solutions Integration

In each of these areas, we will start out by identifying a core group with a strong interest that can take responsibility for getting it going. The plan is for each team to start developing a knowledge-base on the Fedora Commons wiki gathering information in each of these four areas about standards, useful software, good practice, etc. They will also be aggressively looking for new recruits who have a strong interest in each subject. If all goes as we hope, “solution councils” will emerge in each area that can lead the development of solution bundles that address each of the use cases. We should have the first public face of these four efforts available in the next month or so. We will send notices to our mailing lists when we do.

Working with three prominent scholars, WGBH is designing a web-based system to address scholars’ needs in terms of searching, selecting and accessing archival moving image materials. In conversation with the scholars, the Media Library and Archives staff discovered that academic researchers want not only to pinpoint items relevant to their work, but also to get an overview of collections and their relationships to other materials. For example, scholars researching in media collections may seek information about the provenance of a particular slice of footage, who shot it, who owns it, and how it was used - or not used - by producers for a particular WGBH program or web site, and they want to do this all online.WGBH has selected Fedora as the back end for this project because it allows them to express and manipulate this information so well. As an archive of film, videos, images and documents which are constantly used and re-used by their productions, the relationships between their archival materials is often highly complex. For example, a WGBH production collects hundreds of images, interviews and stock footage in its research phase, much of which never makes it into the final documentary film. These “outtakes” are stored in the archives and re-used by other productions or for their web sites.

Fedora will allow them to express both the sources and many uses of a particular production element, as well as its intellectual relationship to other elements in the collection.WGBH is developing a custom PHP front end, using the Zend Framework, that communicates with the Fedora repository using Matt Zumwalt’s REST interface. Fedora services are used to translate the internal PBCore metadata into a variety of formats for exchange and reuse by other archives. An OAI-PMH provider will supplement the web page to allow compatible harvesters to integrate with the WGBH catalog. WGBH is also committed to making the process of searching the audio-visual collection easier by encoding interview transcripts in the TEI (tei-c.org) format. WGBH has also deployed the Solr search server to make integrated full-text and field-based searching simple, which combined with useful features like faceted searching and relatedness matching will make a powerful search experience for the user.

In addition to the Mellon prototype project, the WGBH Media Library and Archives will implement a Fedora back end to their IMLS funded Vietnam Archives project. This project will make archival moving image materials from Vietnam: A Television History available online for educators and the general public in the spring of 2010.

About WGBH

WGBH Boston has long been one of the major producers of education television in America. They produce one-third of PBS’s prime time broadcasting, including Nova, FRONTLINE, American Experience, Antiques Roadshow, Masterpiece, Arthur and Curious George, and The World and The Takeaway on public radio. They have also long been pioneers in producing educational multimedia. The WGBH archives are currently available to researchers by appointment, with selected materials available on the web at openvault.wgbh.org.

The pages of the world’s newspapers have traditionally provided a detailed record of the notable events and interests of the communities for which they were produced. Much of this “first rough draft of history” has been preserved intact for decades and even centuries in research libraries and archives.   Today news is produced and delivered in digital media that are inherently dynamic and fugitive, challenging society’s ability to ensure the survival of yesterday’s reporting for future study. ”On the Record” will bring individuals from journalism and the news media, academia, business, and policy research together with library policy- and decision-makers to explore this challenge.Participants will explore the myriad ways in which news content is created, distributed and consumed today, and will engage in focused discussions to formulate innovative strategies for preserving and accessing these materials.

“On the Record” is the fourth in a series of Global Resources Forums.  Previous GRN forums were hosted by Yale University Library’s Center for International and Area Studies (on Scholarly Communications, in 2005), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (on Latin American Studies, in 2006), and Columbia University (on Human Rights Archives and Documentation, in 2007).

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is a consortium of North American universities, colleges and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching.

The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a privately managed, nonprofit corporation with a public mission to provide free and open access to the accumulated wisdom of the world, without distinction as to income, religion, nationality, or other human condition.

We have a number of improvements planned for the Fedora Repository software. Near term tasks are summarized in the Punchlist (follow the link from the new FC Developers Forum). Details may be found in the trackers in the Fedora Commons project on Sourceforge. Please remember to visit Topaz and Mulgara too. Topaz released version 0.9 on Sep 1. Mulgara has been releasing at a harrowing rate about every two weeks with support now for Sparql and a number of performance improvements. The Akubra project for development of a storage layer subsystem has moved to the top of the list for action. All these resources include living documents which change as the developers and the community better understand the requirements and the technology plus free software downloads.

Many members of the community have expressed the importance of making it easier to use Fedora Commons software. While we will always support the needs of enterprise systems too, we have challenged ourselves to improve support for the rapid development of applications within the Web architecture. Matt Zumwalt, Media Shelf, has been a passionate advocate for simplicity and, with his team, has contributed the experimental REST API and is working a Ruby interface. Ben O’Steen, Oxford University Research Archive (ORA), and others have helped frame the arguments for simpler access and improved usability. The Fedora Repository architecture has the potential to be a powerful mash-up engine. It can add value to applications by providing a spanning layer that helps make access to content uniform and durable for diverse storage systems and other kinds of content suppliers. We are looking for collaborators in doing this well.

Fedora Commons must become a more open – open-source software development community. We are still taking baby steps but we already have a Sourceforge presence and have started incorporating code contributions from the community. We now have a published licensing policy in place and an initial technology roadmap. But it is time to take it up a notch. First, we have begun exploring how to collaborate with the extensive and capable DSpace community; we share a common mission and there is enormous opportunity to share common technology. Second, we have launched the new Fedora Commons Wiki. Inside it you will find the Fedora Repository documentation and the Developers Forum plus many other resources. Please expect growing pains, but we will do our best to provide a constant flow of new and updated materials. Better yet, sign up for an account – you can comment on pages, add news and your own contributions to further the Fedora Commons mission.