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.

Read the full Press Release here.

You can find out more about Fedora Commons here.

A conference attendee has set up this del.icio.us page with tags linking to content discussed and presented at the Open Repositories Conference in Texas. There is a particularly interesting tag leading to an article by Paul Miller, ‘The Technology Evangelist’, on library 2.0. The del.icio.us page can be found by clicking here.

The second international conference on open repositories is being held as I type between the 23rd and 26th January in San Antonio, Texas. The conference aims to encourage discussion and promotion of it’s goal of achieving repository interoperability . The conference is sponsored by many global organisations including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard, which illustrates the importance and scale of the event.

The Spoken Word did have plans to attend the conference but unfortunately these plans were never realised. However, it is my intention to keep up to date with the developments at the conference, including discussion surrounding Fedora, by trawling through various blogs and message boards and to report them here, on the Spoken Word Blog.