PHAIDRA Community Call August 6

General
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Here is an overview of the speakers and what they talked about:. The focus of this community call was Open Education & Shared Digital Infrastructure

1. Program & Speakers Overview

We had four main guest presentations:

  • Rastislav Hudák (Senior PHAIDRA Developer) – Core technical updates.
  • Arran Griffith (Program Manager for Academic Open Source Repository Software) – Fedora core upgrades, Vienna Fedora Camp.
  • Veronika Kocher (Art & Research Data Manager, University of Applied Arts Vienna) – “The Angewandte” decoupled systems showcase.
  • Lily Asshauser (Learning Technologist, Salzburg University of Applied Sciences) – OER repository implementation showcase.

The third community call for 2026 is scheduled for Thursday, October 15, 2026, and will feature Sylvia and the team from the University of Padua presenting their OER implementation.

2. Community Management Update!

Ben presented an overview of what is going on in the PHAIDRA community

  • PHAIDRAcon’25 YouTube Videos: All recordings from last year’s conference (“Connecting Scholar and Citizen: The Emerging Social and Cultural Role of the Repository”) are now live on the YouTube channel (@PHAIDRA-org). The playlist comprises 16 presentations, including sessions on sMapshot, Citizen Science, the Milagro Project, and the Aldrovandi Digital Twin. Videos include edited intros, outros, custom transition music, and detailed talk descriptions.
  • PHAIDRAcon’26 Announcement: The next physical conference is scheduled for October 29, 2026, at the Sky Lounge, University of Vienna (Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, Vienna, Austria). The theme is “Data Sovereignty – International, Institutional, Infrastructural”. Registration is free and open online, and the Call for Contributions is currently active.
  • PHAIDRA Partner Day: The dedicated in-person partner gathering will be held on October 28, 2026 (the day before the conference).
  • Showcase Portal - phaidra.org/showcases: The online repository portal features real-world case studies:
    • Belgrade University Library: A 15-year legacy of using PHAIDRA to secure PhD theses, support Serbia’s national e-Science network, and archive community oral histories.
    • Austrian Science Fund (FWF): Open Access integration for academic monographs with OAPEN and OpenAIRE.
    • Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek: A headless configuration using a custom Volare frontend, PHAIDRA as a backend repository, IIIF image delivery, and crowdsourced metadata via sMapshot.
    • Printed Showcase Brochures: Professionally designed physical versions of these showcases are being compiled for distribution at PHAIDRAcon’26.
  • EpistemiCast (epistemicast.org): The latest podcast episode features Neil Jefferies (Executive Director of the Open Preservation Foundation & Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University) [2]. The discussion focuses on maintaining digital longevity through open standards like the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) rather than relying on transient software platforms.

3. Core Platform Development

Rasta presented the major developments in the PHAIDRA software ecosystem:

  • UI Framework Migration (Nuxt upgrade): The user interface is being migrated from the deprecated Nuxt v2 (unsupported for approximately 1.5 to 2 years) to Nuxt v4. The migration has been ongoing since the start of 2026. Over 100 visual and functional bugs were identified and resolved during quality assurance testing with help from Yuri and Giulio (University of Padua). The update is currently live on the main hosted instance and will be deployed to all other hosted partner instances in the coming days. Homepages, headers, and individual custom elements are also being systematically migrated.
  • Versioning Strategy: Core development is formalizing a clearer, more transparent versioning system (aligned with practices like Fedora’s) to let partner institutions (e.g., University of Padua) pin stable repository releases for extended periods (such as a year) without automatic updates.
  • Fedora Version Update: Updated Fedora to version 7.0.0. In version 7, Fedora updated it’s dependencies to newest versions and improved performance for transactions.

4. Fedora Community Updates

Arran delivered updates on behalf of the Fedora repository platform:

  • Fedora Camp Vienna (September 2–4, 2026): To be held at the University of Vienna, offering multi-track hands-on technical sessions for users, managers, and preservationists.
    • Cerabyte Tour: Day two includes a guided tour of the Vienna-based Cerabyte digitization facility, which specializes in encoding data to physical ceramic tablets.
    • OCFL Session: Focused on Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) version 2 use cases, led by Neil Jefferies or Rosalyn Metz (Emory University, participating virtually).
  • Tech Meetings: Fedora has launched a regular monthly EU/UK technical alignment meeting.
  • Fedora 7 Upgrade: This major upgrade replaces over 40 dependency libraries, updating the core infrastructure to modern Java standards and patching older security gaps. Since Fedora utilizes OCFL as its preservation layer, upgrading from Fedora 6 to Fedora 7 is an in-place directory upgrade requiring no active data migration.
  • AI-Assisted Upgrades Proof of Concept: For community-supported tools and extensions, the Fedora development team is raising automated test coverage to over 90%. They are using this high test suite coverage to experiment with AI-assisted dependency upgrades, backed by a mandatory “human-in-the-loop” pull request (PR) review process. This serves as a pilot for generating an official AI contribution policy.

5. Showcase: University of Applied Arts Vienna (The Angewandte)

Veronika Kocher presented the decoupled systems architecture deployed at the Angewandte:

  • Decoupled Architecture: Rather than using a single monolithic repository, the university splits workflows across four user-focused frontends that connect to PHAIDRA as the stable, permanent backend long-term preservation layer:
    1. Portfolio: A private workspace where researchers and artists document, organize, and store creative drafts. It features dynamic metadata forms that change based on the selected entry type (e.g., performances, exhibitions, theater pieces, film series). Authority controls (GND and internal databases) are embedded for clean artist metadata.
    2. Showroom: A curated public showcase profile built from user-selected Portfolio entries. This separates immediate visibility from the permanent archiving process. Users can customize their profiles, such as prioritizing exhibition listings over publications.
    3. IMAGE: An open art education image database containing high-resolution, quality-assured metadata. It supports deep zooming, Quick presentation albums, and slideshow exports (to PDF or PowerPoint) with automatically formatted captions. A custom commenting framework is used to provide metadata context on historically critical or discriminatory terms in collections.
    4. Recherche: A public search portal displaying institutional estates and collections (e.g., Peter Weibel estate, Biennale Archive Austria). It links over 80,000 artists and collections to authority standards (Getty AAT, GND, European Art Net) and feeds into cultural networks like Kulturpool and EOSC.
  • Data Sovereignty & Metrics: The system prioritizes artist-controlled licensing and data sovereignty. The university has explicitly omitted competition tracking metrics (such as citation metrics or publication counts) from their systems, noting that metrics do not accurately reflect artistic output or quality, and introduce unhelpful competition in arts research.

6. Showcase: Salzburg University of Applied Sciences

Lily Asshauser presented the OER repository ecosystem implemented in Salzburg:

  • Transition to PHAIDRA: Switched completely to PHAIDRA at the beginning of 2026 for long-term Open Educational Resources (OER) preservation.

  • Migration Methodology: Semi-automated migration of files and metadata over from their previous edu-sharing platform, which had faced long-term feasibility issues. The migration tooling was built using Claude (“Claude’d our way forward”), though metadata required some back and forth to get everything right. The resulting standard PHAIDRA instance utilizes OER-specific licenses and custom CSS tweaks.

  • Supporting OER Ecosystem:

    • OER Practitioner Training: for our lecturers, certified by the FNMA (Forum Neue Medien in der Lehre Austria). This training ensures lecturers understand proper licensing, public domain rules, and clean metadata attribution prior to uploading. The first cohort finishes in September 2026.
    • Institutional OER Policy: Establishes standard institutional guidelines for utilizing open resources.
    • Search Engine Integration: To maximize discoverability, the Salzburg PHAIDRA instance is directly connected to the Austrian OER Hub and OERSI (a German OER search engine).

7. Additional Highlights

Arran Griffith highlighted an adjacent working group that she facilitates, which examines the impact of automated AI bots crawling and scraping academic, cultural heritage, and library repository infrastructures. Their next solution showcase on August 19, 2026, will feature a guest presenter from the Internet Archive detailing crawler mechanics. All details and registration links were distributed in the Zoom chat.

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