Please forgive cross posting.
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:14:21
-0400
From: Carol Minton Morris <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [Fedora-commons-users] FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, [log in to unmask]
http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, [log in to unmask]
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
[log in to unmask]
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