Fedora Throws Its Hat Into Digital Management Ring

When the University of Virginia library went shopping for a digital library solution four years ago, each solution left them wanting. So they partnered with Cornell to develop the first digital object repository management system based on the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture, or FEDORA.

http://www.fedora.info
http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=5553&IssueID=192
(EContent 14 Oct 2003)

Fedora's open source repository system uses public APIs as Web services. Its strength lies in its ability to handle an enormous quantity of objects -- the university has scaled up to 10 million objects with little difference in performance from their initial half-million -- and its ability to contain and disseminate metadata. The Fedora architecture is based on object models that by definition are templates for units of content, called data objects. These data objects can include digital resources, metadata about the resources, and links to software tools and services. Thornton Staples, UV's director of digital library research and development, said, "Most people think a digital library is about digital asset management. But the ultimate power is in interrelation of all of these things." Fedora, he says, builds "a very elaborate network of content nodes in a network that have relationships to each other." Version 1.1 provides XML submission and storage; parameterized disseminators, basic access control and authentication; OAI metadata harvesting, a default disseminator, searching, and a batch utility. Future releases will offer even more. But while Staples believes that Fedora offers a robust solution for both institutions and other organizations, he is quick to make clear, "We are not in the software business; we would really like to buy a system from someone."

Posted by Tom on October 27, 2003