Fez: Project Overview

Mission

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What problem does this project address?
The project addresses the lack of a suitable freely available and open-source web based Digital Repository, specifically for use in Libraries.
What is the goal of this project?

To provide a sustainable web based digital repository for research documents and data at the University of Queensland Library.

Fez is an open source project to produce and maintain a highly flexible web interface to FEDORA for any Library or Insituition to configure and publish or archive documents of any type sustainably.

What are some key features that define the product?
  • Designed around Fedora 2.1
  • XSD based document type mapping to Webform HTML inputs for highly configurable web interface screens.
  • Uses simple open-source web technologies: PHP 5 & MySQL 4.1
  • Advanced Searching.
  • Browsing by Author, Subject etc.
  • Self archival registration process for academic submission.
  • Automatic Preservation Metadata extraction.
  • GUI configurable document workflow and document lifecycle management.
  • LDAP (or Active Directory) and internal group Authentication and Authorisation.
  • Security based on FezACML to describe user roles an rights on a per object basis or through parent collection or community security inheritance.
  • Based on Communities and Collections with object relationships mapped with RELS-EXT datastreams.
  • Statistics (eg Downloads per Author, per Community, per Collection, per Subject etc).
  • Security based at object granularity, drilled down from parent Communities and Collections.
  • Controlled Vocabularies (eg the Australian Standard Research Classification).
  • Basic browsing and search.
  • Basic OAI Service Provider.
What are some key features that are planned and in development for the product?
  • Peer review and research reporting interfaces.
  • Innovative Innopac Authentication and Authorisation.
  • Automatic Archival to web-format datastream (file) conversion.
  • Automatic Object Provenance and Changes/History logging.
  • Commenting system.
  • Annotation system.
  • Federated Searching.
  • Federated Authentication (possible via Shibboleth and the MAMS project).
  • Complex OAI Service Provider based on searches.
  • Integration with a Handles server.
  • Integration with a Google web crawler service provider.
  • Dynamic Canned Search Links (eg for Authors, Controlled Vocabularies)
  • A Tie-in for Creative Commons licencing.
  • Full Text Indexing/Searching (eg For PDFs).
  • Conversion of PDF/Word files into XML format.
  • An Australian Digital Theses service provider.
  • A Picture Australia service provider.
 
What makes this product different from others?
This is an open source project that you are welcome to use for free and help make better. Existing freely available and open-source web interfaces to FEDORA are few and limited in functionality.
This system has been designed to be as flexible as possible.
Is this project part of a larger effort?
Yes. It is part of the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR). Fez is one of the deliverables of the APSR eScholarship testbed in the University of Queensland Library.

Status

What is the status of this project?
The software is ready for Beta release on SourceForge. Development will continue through 2005 and 2006 as new releases of Fedora are released and planned Fez features are completed.
 

Applicability

Who should use this product?
Fez is aimed at librarys and instituitions primarily for education and archival.
How can users get started?
See the installation instructions.