Fedora at
Northwestern University

In the Fall of 2001 Academic Technologies and Northwestern University Library joined the Fedora "Deployment Group", working with other institutions testing early versions of the Fedora digital object repository being developed at the University of Virginia and Cornell University.

Goals

Our initial interest in Fedora stems from its ability to present like objects through a common API regardless of underlying implementations and data models. This affords production efficiency, flexibility in technology migration, and makes it easier to build pedagogical tools such as groupware and annotation systems around scholarly materials. The challenge here is in defining appropriate models for repository objects, especially complex objects that reference or contain other objects in the repository or present content managed outside of the repository - such as in relational or XML databases, streaming media servers, and image servers. Our goal then is to explore various repository applications for teaching and research at Northwestern that draw on a variety of content models.

Planned Test Cases

An archive of approximately 1700 American Studies images collected by faculty for teaching purposes, accessed with private groupware and annotation tools. Each image is represented by thumbnail and medium sized jpeg images, and an XML metadata file.

A collection of approximately 2300 historical video clips of MPEG-1 video served from a streaming media server. Each clip is represented by a video stream, jpeg still, and XML metadata file.

A collection of approximately 200 hi-resolution images from an historical anatomy atlas. Each image is represented by a TIFF file encoded and cached in a variable resolution image server, an SVG file containing multiple layers of vector graphic overlay, and an XML metadata file.

A TEI-encoded text (Vesalius' Fabrica) that references the above figures, represented by a single XML file containing references to the figure images above.

A TEI-encoded corpus (Shakespeare) that links each word to its dictionary entry and grammatical description. This is a corpus of 45 TEI files. Each word references a dictionary entry and grammatical description in a relational database.

Implementations

Warning - These collections are in active development and so may look like it!

Contacts

Bill Parod, Academic Technologies
Steve DiDomenico, Northwestern University Library


Academic Technologies
Northwestern University Library

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