The newest version of a software program designed to store whole libraries has been released for testing by the Ithaca not-for-profit Fedora Commons.
Earlier versions first launched in 2003 are used for Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine collections and 99 other repositories, including the National Library of Scotland and Sun Microsystems Honeycomb Group.
This 12th Fedora release, a beta — or test — version of Fedora 3.0 combined with another type of software that preserves content, is available for download at no charge at www.fedora-commons.org/.
FEDORA — which stands for Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture — was created in 1997 in Ithaca by Carl Lagoze and Sandy Payette, researchers in Cornell University’s Information Science Program.
Some librarians at the University of Virginia heard about it and thought Fedora could help hold their collections. In May 2003, Cornell and the University of Virginia teamed up, secured funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and released Fedora software.
With Fedora, digital objects, like photos or documents, stay in one piece “like well-thumbed and trusted books on shelves,” said Carol Minton Morris, a research associate in the digital libraries research group in Cornell Information Science.
“Any digital object that a user can gain access to can be altered. Fedora enables systems to be built that can keep track of how the object might be altered over time, or that can restrict access to digital objects so that they can’t be altered,” she said.
An online museum could display a photograph in thumbnail size and also in a larger size, and those versions can be preserved along with the image itself, she said.
