NEWS RELEASE: Fedora 3.3 Available Now!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 21, 2009

Contact: Thornton Staples; Chris Wilper

Go Get It: Fedora 3.3 Available Now!

Ithaca, NY, Boston, MA  Today, the DuraSpace not-for-profit  
organization and the Fedora digital repository project announced the  
release of Fedora 3.3 (http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/x/jQ3S).  
This release marks a new milestone in the process of developing the  
Fedora open source software. For the first time, the Fedora community  
came together under the leadership of a Community Release Manager who  
facilitated the software development process and the integration of  
community contributions.  The effort was led by Kai Strnad, Software  
Engineer with FIZ Karlsruhe (http://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de/) and member  
of the eSciDoc project team (https://www.escidoc.org/).

Download Fedora 3.3 here: http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/x/jQ3S.

Thornton Staples, Director of the Fedora Project from DuraSpace,  
observed, “The process of developing open-source software with a  
community-based process requires dedicated effort by many community  
participants, both developers and users. Though there is a perception  
that open-source software gets written by hobbyist programmers working  
on their own late at night, it is more commonly written by programmers  
working for institutions that are committed to the software and  
understand its shared benefits.  FIZ-Karlsruhe has done us all a great  
service by making Strnad available to manage this release, getting us  
off to a running start in a community-led development process.”

Chris Wilper, Fedora Technical Lead and Developer from DuraSpace,  
said, "It's exciting to see so many contributors stepping forward to  
take a hand in Fedora's evolution. A wide variety of perspectives and  
a willingness to give back to the community are key to making the  
Fedora software better for everyone."

There are many new features in Fedora 3.3 including:

• Support for relationships among datastreams within digital objects,  
including API methods for manipulating relationships and indexing

• Integration of the Fedora Enhanced Security Layer (FESL), a new  
community-developed module to support a wider range of authentication  
methods

• Improvements to the Fedora REST API

• Support for retrieving content using a File URI scheme during ingest

• Support for Microsoft SQL Server

• Support for Mulgara to 2.1.4, proving a significant performance boost

• Upgrade of bundled Tomcat to version 6

• Support for HTTP Proxy server for getting external content

• Improvements and enhancements to the Fedora documentation

• Bug fixes, improving the overall stability of the repository

Many individuals and institutions support the development of the  
Fedora open source repository software.  The Fedora Project would like  
to extend thanks to members of the worldwide community whose  
contributions made the release of Fedora 3.3 possible, especially  
Benjamin Armintor, Columbia University; Asger Askov Blekinge, State  
and University Library, Denmark; Steve Bayliss, Acuity Unlimited;  
Aaron Birkland, NSDL-Cornell University; Bill Branan, DuraSpace;  
Daniel Davis, Cornell University; Gert Pedersen, Technical University  
of Denmark; Edwin Shin, Media Shelf; Kai Strnad, Fedora 3.3 Community  
Release Manager, FIZ Karlsruhe; Chris Wilper, DuraSpace; and Andrew  
Woods, DuraSpace.

The Fedora Project is supported by the DuraSpace not-for-profit  
organization.

GET INVOLVED!

The Fedora development community welcomes new participants. Meetings  
of the Fedora Committers team are held weekly to discuss overall  
development strategy, prioritize new features, and plan new releases.   
All are welcome to participate or to just listen in.  Archived audio,  
IRC logs, upcoming meeting agendas, and dial-in details can be found  
at:http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCREPO/Developer+Meetings 
.

ABOUT THE FEDORA PROJECT

Fedora (http://Fedora-Commons.org) is a robust, modular repository  
system for the management and dissemination of digital content. It is  
especially suited for digital libraries and archives, both for access  
and preservation. It is also used to provide specialized access to  
very large and complex digital collections of historic and cultural  
materials as well as scientific data. Fedora's flexibility enables it  
to integrate gracefully with many types of enterprise and web-based  
systems, offering scalability (e.g., millions of objects) and  
durability (e.g., all of the information is maintained in files with  
no software dependency, from which the complete repository can be  
rebuilt at any time). It also provides the ability to express rich  
sets of relationships among digital resources and to query the  
repository using the semantic web's SPARQL query language. Fedora has  
a worldwide installed user base that includes academic and cultural  
heritage organizations, universities, research institutions,  
university libraries, national libraries, and government agencies.

ABOUT DURASPACE

DuraSpace (http://DuraSpace.org) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit  
organization. DuraSpace software and services are used worldwide as  
solutions for open access, institutional repositories, digital  
libraries, digital archives, data curation, virtual research  
environments, and more.  DuraSpace provides leadership and innovation  
in the use of open source and cloud-based technologies to serve  
libraries, universities, research centers, cultural heritage  
institutions, and other knowledge stewards.  The organization’s open  
source technology portfolio includes the DSpace open access repository  
application, the Fedora open repository platform, and the Mulgara  
semantic database.  DuraSpace is the home of DuraCloud, an emerging  
cloud-based service that leverages existing cloud infrastructure to  
enable durability and access to digital content.  The DuraSpace team  
includes recognized leaders and experts in the management of digital  
information.  The team works with an active and diverse international  
community committed to the durability of digital resources.

The DuraSpace technology portfolio inherently addresses the issue of  
durability of digital content.  Our values are expressed in our  
organizational byline, “open technologies for durable digital content.”

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Carol Minton Morris
DuraSpace
Director of Marketing and Communications
cmmorris@DuraSpace.org
Skype: carolmmorris
607 255-2702
Twitter@DuraSpace
http://DuraSpace.org