Building a Digital Library with Fedora International Conference on Developing Digital Institutional Repositories Hong Kong December 9, 2004

UVA Digital Library Assumptions: All media, all content types integrated into one collection A network that is built to be a part of a global network The global network will be built by libraries, governments and corporations Searching and browsing are equally important

UVA Digital Library Assumptions (cont.): We will provide to tools to give access and make use of our collections Any given resource can be presented in any number of contexts Increasingly, we will be faced with born-digital materials This is going to take a very long time …

The digital library as a web of content

Text Collections

Explicit Data Modeling for Serials

Collecting Scholarly Projects

Art and Architecture Data

Quantitative Data Collections

The Flexible Extensible Digital Repository Architecture Developed at Cornell under an NSF grant UVA Library re-interpreted the architecture and created the first practical implementation 3 year project funded in 2001 by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create open-source system Another 3 years of development funded by Mellon in 2004

Fedora is a set of web services that can provide a foundation for a variety of information management strategies. –Supports client applications through SOAP or HTTP connections –Provides back-end web services for content through behavior objects –Provides both management and access APIs –Provides a search index aimed at repository management –Fine-grained policy enforcement

Users access data objects through behaviors.

A data object is one unit of content. Persistent ID (PID) Default Disseminator SystemMetadata Datastream (item) Digital object identifier methods for disseminating “views” of content metadata about history and policies Datastream (item) Your Extension set of content or metadata items

Persistent ID (PID) Behavior Definition Metadata SystemMetadata Datastreams Data Object Persistent ID (PID) Service Binding Metadata (WSDL) SystemMetadata Datastreams Web Service behavior contract behavior subscription data contract Persistent ID (PID) Disseminators Datastreams System Metadata Behavior Mechanism Object Behavior Definition Object

Disseminators for Data Normalization Can deliver datastream content directly Can transform content into other sizes or formats for delivery Can be used to hide differences among objects of a given type

Disseminators as User Interface Can deliver a “module” of user interface appropriate for the object Different user interfaces for difference purposes or audiences Easy to add new types of collections by adding new modules of code The set of all behavior objects can be used as a database of code modules Can provide a way to collect the “look and feel” of scholarly projects in a formal way

Relationships Among Objects Relationship metadata datastream in the data object Describes adjacency relationships among objects RDF data of the form: PID – typeOfRelationship – relatedObjectPID Can used to assemble collections for such things as creating full-text search indexes Can build graphs of relationships to feed into a variety of user interfaces

Uses Resource Description Framework (RDF) The repository can be configured to index any combination of the following aspects of a digital object: –System metadata properties –Dublin Core metadata –Metadata about datastreams and disseminations –Relationship metadata –Internal dependencies (e.g., between datastreams and disseminators) The Resource Index

UVA First Implementation Arch Demo

Disseminators Two default disseminators on every object –Default access behaviors, i.e. getPreview, getFullView, getLabel, getDefaultContent –Administrative and descriptive metadata behaviors Class-specific disseminators, i.e. image and text disseminators Search services to be provided using collection object disseminators

Text Collections: three models TEI transcriptions of texts plus page images TEI transcriptions only Page images only, but the text represented by a minimal TEI filePage images only

Future Fedora Development Improved infrastructure for workflow Support for building indexes for searching Infrastructure for building federations of Fedora repositories Enhance performance Support for preservation Begin organizing a Fedora development consortium

Fedora Project web site: UVA Digital Initiatives: