Go Get It: Fedora 3.3 Available Now!

Ithaca, NY, Boston, MA 

Today, the DuraSpace not-for-profit organization and the Fedora digital repository project announced the release of Fedora 3.3 (http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/x/jQ3S). This release marks a new milestone in the process of developing the Fedora open source software. For the first time, the Fedora community came together under the leadership of a Community Release Manager who facilitated the software development process and the integration of community contributions.  The effort was led by Kai Strnad, Software Engineer with FIZ Karlsruhe (http://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de/) and member of the eSciDoc project team (https://www.escidoc.org/).

Download Fedora 3.3 here: http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/x/jQ3S.

Thornton Staples, Director of the Fedora Project from DuraSpace, observed, “The process of developing open-source software with a community-based process requires dedicated effort by many community participants, both developers and users. Though there is a perception that open-source software gets written by hobbyist programmers working on their own late at night, it is more commonly written by programmers working for institutions that are committed to the software and understand its shared benefits.  FIZ-Karlsruhe has done us all a great service by making Strnad available to manage this release, getting us off to a running start in a community-led development process.”

Chris Wilper, Fedora Technical Lead and Developer from DuraSpace, said, "It's exciting to see so many contributors stepping forward to take a hand in Fedora's evolution. A wide variety of perspectives and a willingness to give back to the community are key to making the Fedora software better for everyone."

There are many new features in Fedora 3.3 including:

• Support for relationships among datastreams within digital objects, including API methods for manipulating relationships and indexing

• Integration of the Fedora Enhanced Security Layer (FESL), a new community-developed module to support a wider range of authentication methods

• Improvements to the Fedora REST API

• Support for retrieving content using a File URI scheme during ingest

• Support for Microsoft SQL Server

• Support for Mulgara to 2.1.4, proving a significant performance boost

• Upgrade of bundled Tomcat to version 6

• Support for HTTP Proxy server for getting external content

• Improvements and enhancements to the Fedora documentation

• Bug fixes, improving the overall stability of the repository

Many individuals and institutions support the development of the Fedora open source repository software.  The Fedora Project would like to extend thanks to members of the worldwide community whose contributions made the release of Fedora 3.3 possible, especially Benjamin Armintor, Columbia University; Asger Askov Blekinge, State and University Library, Denmark; Steve Bayliss, Acuity Unlimited; Aaron Birkland, NSDL-Cornell University; Bill Branan, DuraSpace; Daniel Davis, Cornell University; Gert Pedersen, Technical University of Denmark; Edwin Shin, Media Shelf; Kai Strnad, Fedora 3.3 Community Release Manager, FIZ Karlsruhe; Chris Wilper, DuraSpace; and Andrew Woods, DuraSpace.

The Fedora Project is supported by the DuraSpace not-for-profit organization.

GET INVOLVED!

The Fedora development community welcomes new participants. Meetings of the Fedora Committers team are held weekly to discuss overall development strategy, prioritize new features, and plan new releases.  All are welcome to participate or to just listen in.  Archived audio, IRC logs, upcoming meeting agendas, and dial-in details can be found at:http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCREPO/Developer+Meetings.

ABOUT THE FEDORA PROJECT

Fedora is a robust, modular repository system for the management and dissemination of digital content. It is especially suited for digital libraries and archives, both for access and preservation. It is also used to provide specialized access to very large and complex digital collections of historic and cultural materials as well as scientific data. Fedora's flexibility enables it to integrate gracefully with many types of enterprise and web-based systems, offering scalability (e.g., millions of objects) and durability (e.g., all of the information is maintained in files with no software dependency, from which the complete repository can be rebuilt at any time). It also provides the ability to express rich sets of relationships among digital resources and to query the repository using the semantic web's SPARQL query language. Fedora has a worldwide installed user base that includes academic and cultural heritage organizations, universities, research institutions, university libraries, national libraries, and government agencies.

ABOUT DURASPACE

DuraSpace is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. DuraSpace software and services are used worldwide as solutions for open access, institutional repositories, digital libraries, digital archives, data curation, virtual research environments, and more.  DuraSpace provides leadership and innovation in the use of open source and cloud-based technologies to serve libraries, universities, research centers, cultural heritage institutions, and other knowledge stewards.  The organization’s open source technology portfolio includes the DSpace open access repository application, the Fedora open repository platform, and the Mulgara semantic database.  DuraSpace is the home of DuraCloud, an emerging cloud-based service that leverages existing cloud infrastructure to enable durability and access to digital content.  The DuraSpace team includes recognized leaders and experts in the management of digital information.  The team works with an active and diverse international community committed to the durability of digital resources.
The DuraSpace technology portfolio inherently addresses the issue of durability of digital content.  Our values are expressed in our organizational byline, “open technologies for durable digital content.”

Contact: Thornton Staples; Chris Wilper