In an abstract sense, it suffices to say that at the very core Fedora is a content management system (CMS) just like Wordpress, or Drupal. The similarities with Wordpress and Drupal include ability to add and alter content, have a relational (or graph) database store content and content description (XML), being coded in a server-side scripting language (Java in the case of Fedora, and PHP in the case of Wordpress and Drupal), user administration capabilities, and a user interface.
But that is about where the similarities end. Fedora as a CMS provides specialized tools for archiving and preservation related work that unlike other CMSs are not targeted towards publishing articles, blogs, or full-fledged web portals. Instead, Fedora is designed to fulfill the needs for archivists and collections managers who need to manage large repositories of digital 'objects' – including born-digital, as well as digitized objects from the built world (photographs, sound recordings, video clips, etc.). In accordance, Fedora provides tools and interfaces for the following typical activities involved in archival/preservation work:
- Creating content
- Ingesting content
- Managing content
- Disseminating content
Let us look at the features of Fedora that facilitate the above mentioned activities.
What Fedora can do
- It supports the creation and management of digital content objects called Fedora Digital Objects, or FDOs, that can either represent a single unit of content, as well as an aggregation of FDOs. A good example is a set of TIFF images corresponding to all scanned pages of a physical document. Together, all these TIFF images form one FDO, but all individual TIFF images are themselves individual FDOs.