Tufts University has been a deployment partner of the Fedora project since 2000. Rob Chavez answered our survey questions about the Tufts Fedora implementation.
Centralization of the existing digital library projects at Tufts required software that would allow them to leverage these collections and the tools which had already been built to support them in a flexible way. Fedora was chosen because it gave them the flexibility to deal with the idiosyncrasies of their data.
The repository implementation at Tufts includes the Tufts Digital Library and the Tufts Digital Repository. Both of these are quite complex, with many modules added to the core Fedora software. The Tufts Digital Library includes a digital ingestion drop box service, naming service, search service, and various other small portal services. Applications that have been built on top of Fedora include VUE—Visual Understanding Environment, a concept mapping tool that allows users to pull out information about objects from a repository and manipulate it within the VUE application. VUE is a java application that interacts with Fedora via an OKI bridge. Also included as an external application to Fedora is the Tufts Digital Library Application—a collection of java server pages that are built on top of Fedora disseminators and content models. The DL Application allows users to search, browse, and view objects in the repository, but only objects assigned to the Digital Library space.
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