Fez, a flexible, digital repository and workflow management system, was released in November 2005 by UQ staff under open source license. The site for downloading software and keeping on top of software development is http://sourceforge.net/projects/fez/. The Fez software is PHP- and MySQL-based and works as a front-end and administration tool using Fedora (http://www.fedora.info/), an excellent tool for managing objects and the relationships between them. In a Fedora repository, objects can be communities, collections, and records. Records can belong to both collections and communities. Details of the software, documentation and further planned development is at http://www.library.uq.edu.au/escholarship/
UQ staff are now using Fez to build UQ eSpace, a new digital repository to house or point to existing UQ research data, both published and unpublished. UQ eSpace will be launched in 2006. Staff are currently testing the Fez repository functionality, and plan to release revised versions of Fez as new features are developed throughout 2006.
Planned Fez developments for semester 1, 2006, include:
§ Developing the following service providers for harvesters based on customised OAI feeds
o Complex OAI service provider supporting setso A Picture Australia service providero An Australian Digital Theses service providero Google web crawler service provider to enable crawling by a range of Internet search engines and tools
§ Developing peer review and research reporting interfaces, including a commenting and annotation system, for both standard repository use and for possible integration with RQF reporting
§ Integrating the ARROW Handles server module for Fedora to provide persistent access to material, even after migration of records and objects between systems
§ Developing canned search links (e.g. for authors, controlled vocabularies)
§ Developing automatic archival to web-format datastream (file) conversion for images, resulting in four image versions – thumbnail, preview, Web and archival
§ Developing security for repository objects at the most granular level using Fez-ACML
§ Starting
o the ingest of non-print local data collectionso the migration of existing collections (ePrints, ADT) to Fez
§ Documenting
Contact: Belinda Weaver
