The procurement process is finished and the choice is made – the University of York is going to implement Fedora for its multimedia digital library. Fedora is an open source digital repository infrastructure designed for flexibility and was the only open source product that we evaluated against 3 commercial products. Among the reasons for our choice are:
- Fedora’s flexible architecture and data model
- The scope for local development to tailor our digital library service to user needs
- The strong and growing user community both in the UK and worldwide and recent injection of extra funding
- The potential for developing in-house skill and expertise
Out-of-the box, Fedora gives us lots of scope and flexibility, some basic object management, access control and web services for further integration and interface-building. With the addition of an open source interface, such as Muradora, we can quickly add a graphical user interface, simple user deposit workflow, DC and MODS support and access control to object level. Beyond that we are faced with the challenge of identifying our user requirements more fully and turning these into concrete developmental add-ons.
This was both a strategic and pragmatic decision and we are well aware of the risks in going down the open source route. Hopefully though, with talented developers and a solid project plan, we can make best use of Fedora’s architecture, it’s flexibility and it’s object model to best suit York’s needs.
Working with the Fedora community so far on our software evaluation has demonstrated both their commitment to the product and common-sense view of its imperfections, both of which should benefit us as we begin our implementation here.
York Digital Library 
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