David Wilcox
Product Manager
LYRASIS
Jennifer Gilbert
Senior Technical Information Specialist
National Library of Medicine
Tim Shearer
Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies and IT
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Aaron Birkland
Senior Software Engineer
Johns Hopkins University
In 2018, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded DuraSpace a planning grant (LG-72-18-0204) to investigate the barriers that prevent hundreds of U.S. based libraries and archives from upgrading to a supported version of Fedora. Continued community reliance on the unsupported Fedora 3 puts the stability, security, accessibility, and functionality of these repositories at risk. The planning project revealed a pair of crucial themes: effort and value. Any software upgrade/migration requires effort (labor, time, and cost), so it must provide enough value to justify the cost. This insight has informed the design of Fedora 6. This version includes a commitment to developing tools, documentation, case studies, and defined paths that will provide resources to support a valuable upgrade process. This panel session will feature representatives from the project advisory board, Fedora 6 pilot program, and technical team who will present a summary of the report findings, discuss how community stakeholders are engaging with Fedora 6 development and lay out a roadmap for next steps based on the recommendations from the report.