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The waves in the bay outside my hotel balcony gently crashed upon the beach; their rhythmic splash perfectly mimicked the theme of the DORSDL (Digital Object Repository Systems in Digital Libraries) workshop and the first annual Fedora Commons European Union User Group meeting at ECDL (European Conference for Digital Libraries) 2008 held in Aarhus, Denmark.
Sandy began the DORSDL Workshop Thursday morning with her presentation depicting an overview of the evolution of libraries from their start as creators of repositories and their development into interesting spaces focusing on applications and infrastructure. She pointed to the problem that emerges when these waves of expansion begin to crash upon 'repository islands.' The crux of her discussion addressed this issue and the strides that Fedora is making of incorporating new trends in technology like Atom, cloud storage, etc. Much of the question and answer session afterward revolved around access policy creation, implementation, and enforcement.
Other notable presentations of the workshop included Easy on Fedora - Using eSciDoc: Turnkey Access? by Lodewijk Bogaards, Herbert Van de Sompel's overview of aDORe, Science in the Cloud: Google and Sharing Huge Datasets presented by Robert Tansley, an introduction to the to-be-named Microsoft Research-Output Repository platform from Alex Wade, and Gert Schmeltz Pedersen's Evaluation of Solutions to Filtering of Search Results by Access Constraints. A full list of presentations can be found at: http://dorsdl2.cvt.dk/.
Friday's inaugural Fedora Commons EU User Group meeting began with a short welcome and Fedora Commons' organizational overview by Sandy. Much of the morning was spent in a very informal question and answer session, as community members tossed around thoughts and ideas about the Fedora architecture, content models, interfaces, and infrastructure. After a brief presentation regarding community updates, outreach efforts, and marketing by Carissa, several community members presented current Fedora projects. Andreas Hense discussed his work on a Fedora-backed wiki known as Wikidora. Several individuals from Trifork, a software development company based in Denmark, presented their work on a content management system that uses Fedora as a store. Andreas Aschenbrenner and Matthias Razum also discussed their individual work with Fedora at the University Gottingen and FIZ Karlsruhe, respectively. The rest of the day was spent in a quick fire question/answer/brainstorm session that generated a lot of ideas surrounding the new content model architecture, APIs, and tools.
Overall, the community members and developers attending both the DORSDL workshop and the EU User Group meeting echoed the same sentiment: compatibility and interoperability need to be the waves that are washing upon the many private repository islands.
