EContent: This Fedora’s Big Enough for Any DAM Project

“When the library set out to purchase a digital library solution
four years ago, it investigated all of the usual suspects along
with content management and asset management vendors, but each
solution left them wanting. As Thornton Staples, director of
digital library research and development at Virginia describes it,
‘There are not good digital library systems out there. Everyone
worries so much about reinventing the wheel, but if you don’t have
a good wheel to begin with you aren’t reinventing anything.’

“So when Staples and Ross Wayland, associate director of the
digital library’s R&D, read a paper by Sandra Payette and Carl
Lagoze at Cornell, they were looking for something brand-new in
digital library thinking. They liked what they read. According to
Staples, ‘We got their software and played with it. It was elegant,
but it had no database and it was not optimized.’ So, after some
retooling of the prototype, the University of Virginia earned a
grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in September 2001 and
formed a partnership with Cornell to develop the first digital
object repository management system based on the Flexible
Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture
(Fedora)…”

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