Building on the Foundation

  • Unlike DSpace, Fedora gives you very little out of the box
  • We needed to build a range of content ingest, management and exposure software on the Fedora foundation
  • Decided to partner with VTLS, Inc. in Blacksburg, VA to develop much of the software on our behalf
  • This decision to partner with VTLS had a number of advantages:
    • saved the ARROW project 3-6 months of startup time (hiring programmers and getting them up to speed on the Fedora APIs)
    • outsourced the risk
    • provided a support base for the software beyond the life of the project
    • contributed to the functionality of the Fedora code base
    • ensured that the ARROW functionality benefits the global institutional repository community
  • The relationship between ARROW and VTLS is a true partnership, with significant transfers of IP in both directions. ARROW has the ability to influence the direction of future versions of VITAL, as well as getting access to pre-beta code for testing and critiquing.