Waves wash up on red sandstone pebbles at Greenwich Beach on Prince Edward Island, and a pastoral view towards Nova Scotia.

The colorful red dirt patchwork of potato farms is evident as you fly into Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island (PEI) located in the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Locals bemoan the lack of economic opportunity while in almost the same breath extolling the virtues of life on this pastoral, white-sand-beach island with a population that seems to have had family “on island” for several generations.

I sat next to a group of Japanese women on the plane who were busily reviewing  guide books laid out in Japanese pictures and text describing the high points of the E. M. Montgomery “Anne of Green Gables” tour of PEI. An industry has sprung up around “the Anne books,” particularly among Japanese devotees. I asked a librarian from the Robertson Library at University of Prince Edward Island why the Anne books resonated in particular with this one group of visitors. Speculation is that perhaps the hopeful story—a needy orphan who overcomes great obstacles with an open heart, good humor, guts, and all-around spunk to make the world a happier place—was in synch with Japanese values. Whatever it is, “the Anne books” are PEI’s cultural cottage industry. The Roberston Library manages the E. M. Montgomery Archive that includes first edition books as well as artifacts, memorabilia, and photographs from the life of E. M. Montgomery.

UPEI campus and items from the E. M. Montgomery Archive.

The Robertson Library houses other significant cultural holdings about the history of Prince Edward Island that University Librarian Mark Leggott is interested in leveraging to promote his institution and his community. I was there to talk with a group of Canadian Maritime librarians, developers, and Leggott’s staff about the new Fedora Commons. I presented “A Walk Along the Fedora Commons” highlighting:

Setting the stage for Fedora Commons: Scholars of the future; A few facts about why 12,000 users and ‘swamp works’ testers downloaded Fedora in the last 6 months; The community, ten Fedora Commons partners and ten reasons why (they chose Fedora), and;Towards a solution-bundle future. NSDL 2.0 tools such as Expert Voices and the NSDL Date Repository API that support of collaborative library building were of particular interest to the group.The audience kindly offered to take part in an on-the-spot user survey that would result in a consensus on “the best beach” to visit on during my brief stay on PEI.

Leggott provided an overview of why he had made the decision to commit resources and staff to the task of taking advantage of Fedora’s unique flexible and extensible repository architecture at UPEI.

UPEI is a small college where mostly 4,000 regional students live and study, a combination of Library in-house and sub-contracted staff comprises Leggott’s Fedora development team. Over five years UPEI has developed several digitization projects including a Dspace repository that housed historical issues of the University’s Red and White student newspaper.

The Culture, Multimedia, Technology and Cognition Project make UPEI’s ambitious Fedora program possible. Leggott refers to a “honkin big set of IBM servers in the library” that has been put in place to develop CMTC Project. This increased hardware capacity has made additional digital library initiatives has provided opportunities to plan for additional UPEI projects. Leggott demonstrated a prototype of the CMTC environment by adding and searching for resources to a Fedora repository.

The “Islandora” vision, as Leggot has dubbed the Fedora-UPEI project has an ambitious set of goals. He arrived at the name inspired by Che Nyguen’s earlier presentation on security issues and the turnkey GUI for fedora repository federated identity and flexible access control–Muradora.

Leggott and his team aim to create a seamless digital repository system that is integrated into their users’ environments and contexts. They will integrate the Fedora digital repository system into primary campus systems using Drupal, a proprietary content management system, Moodle, Groupwise and Open Office. They will also provide support for “landscapes’ tailored for administrative, learning, and research at UPEI.

Leggott often refers to “capacity-building.” By implementing a suite of open source tools he believes that the Library can provide a framework for skills development with new and emerging digitization and semantic web tools for faculty, students, staff and ultimately the PEI community at large. In other words, he would like to, “Encourage people to play.” He reminded the group that companies are looking for playful, creative and inquisitive individuals to fill positions.

“Libraries are redefining tradition,” he said, “By moving from a “library as silo” paradigm that provides discreet or traditional services around books and magazines, to a library as a landscape of services and resources that is core to all academic and administrative endeavors.” He demonstrated an early example of records from the historic UPEI student newspaper “Red and White” that were migrated from Dspace to a Fedora repository, and implemented with a Lucene search over full text and metadata. Leggott would like to personalize Alumni interactions with the University by personalizing alums’ UPEI homepages with selection of Red and White issues from their student years.

He described the administrative services landscape as encompassing paper and digital objects that staff works with in the campus context. This view also includes records archive and canonical information resources such campus calendars.

The learning services landscape encompasses learning resources and services that will focus on the integration of Moodle with Fedora, faculty-created and produced data, as well as eReserve items produced by staff. Leggott highlighted a prototype Moodle library widget integrated with a “sticky” blog. “Every campus course will have a Moodle component by January linked with appropriate library resources,” he says.

The research landscape is characterized by development of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) that began in January of 2007. Leggott has secured 20 UPEI research clients (mollusk lab) and envisions creating a Fedora-based environment that supports researchers throughout the research life cycle: conceptualizing, initializing, analysis, initial results, formalizing, and popularizing. Requirements include the ability to encompass any type of data that is generated in the course of a research process along with stewardship of both short and long-term research data. “It must be seamless,” he stated. VRE is an open source with the exception of the use of Refworks.

Where is all this going? Ultimately Leggott would like Islandora to enable an entire Island Information Landscape that would include resources, culture, and history and community participation in an integrated information system.

He referred to a chart by Richard Green of the RePPoman Project at the University of Hull to illustrate a collaborative model for development that could “involve everyone” in building a Fedora repository.

A future Island Information Landscape would include living archives made possible by CCOP Canadian Heritage funding that might include features such as a Drupal-Fedora environment for grade 7 students to create eTexts based on the Anne of Green Gables books and collection of digital objects from PEI cultural institutions. He also imagines being able to integrate Fedora objects into Second Life or OpenSim, an open source version of Second Life. Playtime at the University of Prince Edward Island has only just begun.