Fez+Fedora

Fez, a flexible, digital repository and workflow management system, was released in November 2005 by UQ staff under the GPL open source license. Fez 1.2 is the latest version. The Fez software is written using PHP and MySQL and works as a front-end and administration tool to 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.

The most recently released Fez software is available for free download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fez/. Details of the software, documentation and further planned development can be found in the Fez Wiki at http://dev-repo.library.uq.edu.au/wiki.

The University of Queensland now uses Fez to underpin UQ eSpace, a new digital repository that will house or point to existing UQ research data, both published and unpublished. UQ eSpace will be launched by the end of 2006. Staff are currently testing the Fez repository functionality, and have released revised versions of Fez throughout 2006. A key additional feature of the latest planned release, Fez 1.3, will be the use of MODS rather than Dublin Core (with extensions) as the repository’s base metadata schema. All current content models are currently being revised for MODS.

Other innovative sites using Fez include utdanning.no, a portal under the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research and eSpacio, the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain.

Other Fez developments for 2006 have included:

• The development of canned search links (e.g. for authors, controlled vocabularies)
• The development of automatic archival to web-format datastream (file) conversion for images, resulting in four image versions – thumbnail, preview, Web and archival
• The development of security for repository objects at the most granular level using Fez-ACML
• The development of usage statistics
• Beginning the ingest of non-print local data collections, especially image collections, and the migration of existing collections (ePrints, ADT) to UQ eSpace. This has involved the tweaking of content models to accommodate ePrintsUQ features such as designation of refereed material, document versioning, linking deposits to user IDs, citation views and so on.
• Documenting the migration process for eprints.org repositories to a Fez repository
• Documenting the use of Fez for the upcoming RQF and for UQ’s locally conducted research assessment exercises
• The integration of software code developed at other Fez sites such as Norways’ utdanning.no
• Object history logging to create an audit trail whenever an object is changed – e.g. created, edited, modified, deleted.