Islandora CLAW

Now that Fedora 4 has a production release, we at the Islandora Foundation would like to share our plans to integrate so that Islandora users, new and existing, can take advantage of the expanded performance and functionality of this major update to Fedora.

The details of our proposed plan and budget can be found in our Fedora 4 Prospectus and Project Plan, prepared by the Fedora 4 Interest Group. In short, we have established Drupal 7.x as the front end for a Fedora 4 prototype, and will commence development in January 2015 with an update and demo of the new system to be ready in time for the Open Repositories conference in June. To reach this goal, we have identified funding needs and begun soliciting support from the Islandora community. The primary use for these funds will be a dedicated developer to serve as Technical Lead on the project and oversee our effort to get an initial product out to the community. The developer for this position was recently selected, and we are very pleased to announce that Daniel Lamb of discoverygarden will be spearheading the technical development of Fedora 4/Islandora 7 integration. 

Taking the lead on overall management of the project will be Project Director Nick Ruest, two-time Islandora Release Manager and heavy contributor to the Islandora stack, with project support from the Islandora Foundation. We will be calling for volunteers from the community to join in the effort and we plan to hold one or two hackfests in the coming year. While developers, both individual and as in-kind donations from supporter institutions, are vital to this project, we are also very much in need of non-developer volunteers to test, document, and provide use cases to determine the features and scope of the update. A call for volunteers will go out in late January or early February. In the mean time, if you have questions or would like to commit funds or developer time to support project, please contact us, or ask on the mailing list.

For more information about how Islandora will work with Fedora 4, please check out this recent webinar hosted by discoverygarden. In the coming months, Nick Ruest and Daniel Lamb will be providing more detailed plans and reports here, and the Fedora 4 Interest Group will move its mandate from being a group to get the community moving towards Fedora 4 integration to a group that will work through the integration by soliciting feedback on proposed use cases and implementations. In addition, the group will work with the greater Fedora community towards a generic Fedora 3.x to Fedora 4 migration scenario.