>From: Carol Minton Morris <clt6 at cornell.edu>
>Date: August 14, 2007 1:52:44 PM CDT
>To: hastac at maillists.uci.edu
>Subject: [HASTAC] FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M
>
>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
>
>CONTACT:
>Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
>(607) 255-9222, payette at cs.cornell.edu
>http://www.fedora-commons.org
>Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
>(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson at moore.org
>
>FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
>FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES
>(Ithaca, New York, August 10, 2007) - Fedora Commons today announced
>the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty
>Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical
>frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how
>scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate
>to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual
>creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that
>will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful
>open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and
>the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the
>Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora)
>developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information
>Science.
>
>With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to
>support the development and deployment of open source software,
>which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly,
>scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form.
>The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and
>Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of
>intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and
>students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas,
>and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues
>worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository
>system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon
>Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity
>and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new
>form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software
>platform that both enables collaborative models of information
>creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to
>secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual,
>scientific, and cultural history.
>
>Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the
>development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore
>Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification
>of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate
>in software development, application deployment, and community
>outreach for Fedora Commons. This network of partners will be
>instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit
>organization that will support and incubate open-source software
>projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation,
>access, collaboration, and preservation.
>
>According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons,
>"the new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships
>that make it possible for academic and scientific communities to
>publish, share, and archive the results of their own work in a free,
>open fashion, and make it possible to analyze and use content in
>novel ways."
>
>"Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that
>provides the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of
>scholars will have enduring impact. The unanticipated
>cross-disciplinary uses of this open platform are the hallmark of
>this revolutionary infrastructure," said Jim Omura, technology
>strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
>Payette also noted, "The open-source software that is developed and
>distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of
>what is often referred to as "e-Research" and "e-Science," including
>storage of experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer
>review, publication of findings, and the reuse of published material
>for the next generation of scholarly works. We will also continue
>our work with libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of
>digitized collections, making previously locked away material
>available to wide audiences. Also, building on our attention to
>digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system,
>Fedora Commons will continue to stress the importance of the
>sustainability of digital information in applications of our work."
>
>About Fedora Commons
>Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to
>provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and
>organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital
>content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and
>cultural heritage. Since 2001, with support from the Andrew W.
>Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and the University of Virginia
>have collaborated on the Fedora Project which has developed,
>distributed, and supported innovative open-source repository
>software that combines content management, web services, and
>semantic technologies. The Fedora software has been adopted
>worldwide to support an array of applications including open-access
>publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries, e-science,
>archives, and education.
>
>Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science
>Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Executive
>Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the
>Fedora architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source
>Fedora Project. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides
>leadership from multiple communities, including open-access
>publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities. For more
>information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.
>
>About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
>The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to
>advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific
>research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San
>Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation's Science Program seeks to make
>a significant impact on the development of provocative,
>transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in
>emerging fields. For more information, visit http://www.moore.org.
>
>--
>Carol Minton Morris
>Communications Director
>National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
>http://NSDL.org
>
>Communications and Media Director
>Fedora Commons
>http://www.fedora-commons.org
>
>Cornell Information Science
>301 College Ave.
>Ithaca, NY 14850
>607 255-2702
>clt6 at cornell.edu
__________________________________
--
Diane M. Zorich
113 Gallup Road
Princeton, NJ 08542 USA
Voice: 609-252-1606
Fax: 609-252-1607
Email: dzorich at mindspring.com
