At OhioLINK we’ve reached the conclusion that coding would be easier if we created a modestly robust JAR file that is an implementation of the AXIS-based web services interface to a FEDORA server. Our initial effort is ready for public consumption; you can check it out of our Subversion repository at:

http://drc-dev.ohiolink.edu/svn/FedoraClientJar/trunk

The JavaDocs are available at:

http://drc-dev.ohiolink.edu/javadoc/FedoraClientJar/

If you ask the OhioLINK team, they’ll tell you that the API has undergone significant changes in its young life, but I think it will settle down now. Some features:

I think it is safe to say that most everyone favors using “fedora-dr” as a common tag for FEDORA(.info) activities. If you want to take a stand on moral grounds, you can also tag your items as simply “fedora”, but please also use the “fedora-dr” tag until we’ve gotten around to taking over more of the world.

This, of course, is just a recommendation from a loose confederation of self-selected interest users. You can follow it or ignore it as you like. Thanks to everyone who offered an opinion.

In an earlier post, I extolled the virtues of Fedora as an ideal candidate for digital preservation because “[a]ll of the metadata (descriptive, preservation, and relationship to other objects) and managed datastreams that make up a digital object are ‘serialized’ to a single XML file on a file system.” Well, as I found out last week, it isn’t quite that straight forward.