Managing compound objects within Fedora

Abstract

The Fedora digital repository system originated in the mid 1990s with an academically‐based project to explore how digital content could be organised, if you were starting from a blank sheet. The focus was on the organisation of any type of digital content, both simple and rich, and recognised at an early stage that the management of such content required a flexible and open approach. An underpinning element of the Fedora architecture, therefore, is the digital object model that determines how digital objects can be organised and managed within the same system. This model encompasses both the content itself and the metadata describing it on an extensible basis; as circumstances change over time requirements for describing digital objects may change but you may not wish to lose how it was previously described. The ability to record relationships between digital objects, and to a lesser extent between different parts of an individual digital object, is also built into the digital object model.