The Fedora Project: An Open Source Repository for the Management of Content and Services

Thornton Staples
Director of Research and Development
University of Virginia Library

Sandy Payette
Researcher
Cornell University

The challenge in building digital repositories lies beyond storage and dissemination of digital content. Rather, there is increasing demand for repository architectures that allow aggregation of diverse and distributed content and the transformation of that content to meet the needs of varied audiences. For example in the increasingly popular area of educational digital libraries, “active learning objects” tie together primary sources from the Web, teacher created content, and mechanisms for presentation and interaction. Alongside this requirement there is the need for the repository architecture to accommodate library needs for uniform management of these diverse and complex digital resources. The Fedora Project, a Mellon-funded cooperative project between University of Virginia and Cornell University, has developed and made available open source software that meets these architectural challenges.

This session will briefly review the Fedora architecture and the functionality of the software, and will demonstrate its use in several testbeds.