Fedora 3.0 Released

Fedora has been downloaded 25,000 times in the last year, and is used by over 125 national libraries, institutions, and businesses worldwide to do more with their digital collections, enable long-term preservation of digital assets, build on a flexible and extensible, modular architecture, keep control of their data, and participate in Fedora's innovative community.

"Users will find it simpler to maintain and operate their repositories with version 3.0-it's more scalable and fits better into the Web."

Fedora 3.0 features the Content Model Architecture (CMA), an integrated structure for persisting and delivering the essential characteristics of digital objects in Fedora. (Also availlable at (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fedora-commons). The Fedora CMA plays a central role in the Fedora architecture, in many ways forms the over-arching conceptual framework for future development of Fedora Repositories.

Dan Davis explains the CMA in the context of Fedora 3.0, "It's a hybrid. The Fedora CMA handles content models that are used by publishers and others, and is also a computer model that describes an information representation and processing architecture." By combining these viewpoints, Fedora CMA has the potential to provide a way to build an interoperable repository for integrated information access within organizations and to provide durable access to our intellectual works.

Fedora asks you to continue to contribute your observations and comments to or . Fedora 2.2.2 will continue to be supported for production repositories.

U of Michigan Exposes Records for Harvesting, Releases OAI Toolkit

The University of Michigan Library recently announced that records from their MBooks collection are available for Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting. The MBooks collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the University of Michigan.
Only records for MBooks available in the public domain are exposed, (split into sets containing public domain items according to U.S. copyright law, and public domain items worldwide). There are currently over 100,000 records available for harvesting, with plans for 1 million records when the whole collection has been digitized by Google.

In conjunction, the open-source OAI toolkit has been released on SourceForge. This toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/umoaitoolkit/

New Exhibit at the University of Saskatchewan Archives

New Exhibit: Ambisextrous: Gender Impersonators of Music Hall and Vaudeville
Ambisextrous: Gender Impersonators of Music Hall and Vaudeville is an exhibition of images from the collection of the University of Saskatchewan Archives.

In 2006 Neil Richards donated to the University of Saskatchewan Archives a collection dealing with the history of theatrical transvestism and gender impersonation. The collection was assembled in connection with research for his digital exhibition All Frocked Up: Glimpses of Cross-Dressing in Saskatchewan (2003).
"The Richards collection comprises sheet music, programs, postcards, photographs, audio and video recordings. The collector attempted to represent many of the performing artists who crossed genders in their acts and the various arenas in which these impersonations were presented. An especial strength of the collection is the representation of performers associated with British music hall and with vaudeville, its North American counterpart."
"Ambisextrous is a contribution to Saskatchewan Resources for Sexual Diversity (SRSD), a project established in 2004 to improve access to information on gender and sexual diversity available in Saskatchewan’s libraries and archives."