The Fedora Project: An Open-source Digital Object Repository Management System

In September 2001, the University of Virginia was awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop the first digital object repository management system based on the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora) [1]. The Digital Library Research Group at Cornell University originally developed Fedora under a National Science Foundation Grant [1-3]. Fedora is one of a number of repository architectures that have been proposed over recent years for use in digital libraries. Related architectures have included those described in Kahn and Wilensky [4], Arms, et.al. [5], Mönch [6], and Nelson and Maly [7]. The Digital Library Research and Development Department at the University of Virginia Library reinterpreted the architecture and built a prototype that demonstrated the feasibility of the architecture with their large and diverse digital collections [8]. Together, the two groups make up the development team for the project.