Grants

Samvera (formerly Hydra) – from the very beginning – has been a self-organized, self-funded, and sustainable project. Partners join the effort because it helps them achieve their local priorities better, faster and cheaper, and not because they are chasing after grant money. For Samvera this is a key asset and a key strategy; the Community survives and thrives based on the contributions of Partners, not based on external funding. 

That is not to say that grants don't play a role in the Samvera Community; many Partners, and increasingly funding agencies, are looking at us as a means to integrate, sustain and maximize the reach of a grant, by plugging into a large and growing community.

If you are interested in including Samvera in a proposal for a grant, please email the Samvera Board.

If you are in receipt of a Samvera-related grant that is not listed below, please add the details (most recent grants are at the top of the list).  If you'd prefer, email to details to the Samvera Board and we'll add them for you. 

Name of grant

Funder

Recipient institution(s) (and PI)

Duration and amount

Description

Name of grant

Funder

Recipient institution(s) (and PI)

Duration and amount

Description

Hyku for Consortia: Removing Barriers to Adoption

Institute of Museum and Library Services

PALNI and PALCI

2021-2023

$248,050

The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana, in partnership with the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc., will increase the flexibility, accessibility, and usability of Hyku, the multi-tenant repository platform system. This project will extend previous work and improve the national digital repository infrastructure by enhancing an open-source platform suitable for access to diverse types of materials, addressing needs articulated by stakeholders and consortia, and reducing barriers to adoption. In addition to technology development, we will develop an operational toolkit geared toward the administration of consortially owned and managed repository services that is agnostic to any specific technology. The toolkit will provide guidelines, information, and other materials to support the development of similar services in other consortia. https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-250163-ols-21 https://www.hykuforconsortia.org/

Advancing Hyku: Open Source Institutional Repository Platform Development

Arcadia Fund

University of Virginia

(Ellen Ramsey)

British Library

Ubiquity Press

2019-2021

$1,000,000

Through this project, the University of Virginia and its partner institutions—Ubiquity Press and the British Library—will support the growth of open access through institutional repositories. Working with the global open infrastructure community, the partners will introduce significant structural improvements and new features to the Samvera Community’s Hyku Institutional Repository platform. Read the entire announcement at the link below.

https://news.library.virginia.edu/2019/10/15/hyku-open-source-institutional-repository-development-partnership-awarded-1m-arcadia-grant-to-improve-open-scholarship-infrastructure/

Open Impact:
Developing Robust Analytics for Open Source
Solution Bundle Hyrax

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Oregon State University (@Margaret Mellinger )

University of Oregon (@Franny Gaede )



2019-2022

$203,508

The University of Oregon Libraries, in partnership with Oregon State University Libraries and Press, will develop a suite of analytics and reporting tools for Hyrax (an open source, Samvera-powered repository front end). This project will incorporate existing and emerging best practices for repository analytics with an eye towards balancing accuracy, data privacy, and functionality and contribute to a growing area of library research. Focusing on creating new dashboard functionality to enable repository managers to tell the story of their collections and their users, this project will help increase parity of this open-source infrastructure with third-party repository and analytics platforms. The work will contribute directly to Hyrax's community development initiatives, with all code contributions, documentation, and project updates made openly available and coordinated with platform stakeholders across the country and in alignment with identified Samvera community needs.

https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/grants/lg-36-19-0033-19/proposals/lg-36-19-0033-19-full-proposal.pdf

11/30/2022 Final report submitted

One to Many

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

UCSD

UMIACS

LYRASIS

Emory University

2019-2020

$161,000

The wide adoption of digital repository software by cultural heritage organizations has led to significant increases in effective management and access to digital assets. While these software systems may provide some digital preservation features, the digital materials and their associated metadata managed by such systems need to be preserved in a way that ensures they will persist over time. This project addresses this need by developing a specification for an integration model that will allow libraries and archives to seamlessly deposit system content into distributed digital preservation systems (DDPs) such as Chronopolis, APTrust, and LOCKSS.

CC-IR (Collaborative Consortial Institutional Repository)

Institute of Museum and Library Services

PALCI

PALNI

2019-2021

$172,172

The PALCI and PALNI consortia (representing libraries in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, West Virginia and Indiana) have received a two year IMLS National Leadership Grant to develop Hyku into a multi-tenant, consortia-based service capable of handling OER in addition to other institutional repository resource types. In addition to leveraging collective expertise through consortia, two new work types are being developed for OER and electronic thesis and dissertations.

Sustaining and Expanding the Fulcrum Platform for Long-Form Digital Scholarship

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

University of Michigan / Charles Watkinson (watkinc@umich.edu), Jeremy Morse (jgmorse@umich.edu)

2018-2020

$1,000,000



Scope of this grant was to achieve sustainability of a Fulcrum hosted publishing program through the launch of two large-scale collections while improving the reading experience for digitized backlist ebooks.

Linked data for production (LD4P)

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Stanford University

Cornell University

University of Iowa

Harvard University

2014-2020

$4,000,000

Linked Data for Production: Pathway to Implementation (LD4P phase 2) builds upon the foundational work of Linked Data for Production (LD4P) Phase 1 and Linked Data for Libraries Labs (LD4L Labs), to begin the implementation phase of the cataloging community’s shift to linked data for the creation and manipulation of their metadata.  In support of the cataloging work, a cache of common authorities has been created with the ability to return search results as an RDF serialization including extended context, rank ordering, and pagination data.  A linked data module was added to the Samvera Questioning Authority (QA) gem which processes RDF search results into the standard normalized search result data (i.e. label, id, uri).  Optionally, the linked data module will provide extended context to aid the user in their selection.  Pagination information and performance data can also be requested.  A sort predicate can be identified to allow QA to sort the results.  For our cache system, the sort is the Lucene relevancy ranking.  Significant additional work not directly impacting the Samvera community is included in the grant. Details on that work can be found in the project pages linked above.

Bridge2Hyku

Institute of Museum and Library Services

University of Houston

University of Victoria

University of Miami

IUPUI

2017-2019

$249,103

Bridge2Hyku is an IMLS-funded grant project that is building a migration toolkit to assist institutions interested in migrating their digital content to Hyku. The toolkit contains general guidance for migration planning, documentation for software that enables efficient and effective data migration, and an introduction to the Hyku platform.

Avalon Media System

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Northwestern University

Indiana University

2017-2020

$967,000

Northwestern University Library, in partnership with Indiana University Libraries, will work to increase adoption and ensure sustainability of the open source Avalon audiovisual repository system. The project will work closely with the Hydra community to engage developers, as well as create and implement a cloud-hosted service model for Avalon. It will also integrate the platform with several scholarly tools and media preservation systems, such as the Digital Preservation Network, Archivematica, and the International Image Interoperability Framework. This work will facilitate easier adoption of the platform by a variety of institutions while also adding key features to increase Avalon's functionality.

See http://www.library.northwestern.edu/about/news/library-news/2017/imls-grant-award.html, https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-70-17-0042-17, and the Avalon project website.

NewspaperWorks

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Boston Public Library

University of Utah

2017-2019

$249,999

To create an RDF data model and a set of gems for Hyrax-based repository applications providing a robust functionality for ingesting, describing, displaying and disseminating digitized newspaper content.

Avalon Media System Community Development

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Indiana University

Northwestern University

2015-2018

$750,000

The grant will focus on developing additional features and functionality for Avalon, conducting studies of scholarly use of audio and video media, developing a business model for ongoing sustainability, and offering more flexible implementation options for institutions that prefer to utilize cloud-based rather than locally hosted software.

See http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2015/03/mellon-grants-digital-preservation.shtml and the Avalon project website

Dash

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

California Digital Library (CDL)

2014-2015

$267,000

"Dash is part of our recent initiatives to improve our services for research data curation focusing on the needs of individual researchers rather than institutional librarians.  Architecturally, Dash is an overlay layer that will provide simplified submission and discovery interfaces to (hopefully) *any* repository supporting the SWORD deposit and OAI-PMH protocols, such as our existing Merritt curation repository.

"We evaluated a number of potential approaches to the development of Dash.  However, we were very encouraged by the success our UCSD colleagues had in integrating Hydra on top of their locally-developed DAMS, so we decide to follow a similar path in relying on Hydra/Blacklight to provide us with a very robust set of function out-of-the-box.  Our efforts can then be usefully refocused on refining the UI/UX, trying to achieve a figshare-like simplicity and intuitiveness, and replacing the ActiveFedora/Rubydora components with Dash analogs based on SWORD/OAI-PMH rather than the Fedora API.  This approach of deploying complex curation behaviors through the composition of loosely-coupled, protocol-linked components is in line with our long-term interest in microservice architectures."

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2mw6v93b

Building a Hosted Platform for Managing Monographic Source Materials

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

University of Michigan / Charles Watkinson (watkinc@umich.edu), Jeremy Morse (jgmorse@umich.edu)

2015-2018

$899,000

Initial development of Fulcrum (heliotrope and cozy sun bear). "While in the short term the primary application of the platform is to address the 'companion website' problem (an increasing demand from authors for a way of presenting research data alongside their books), in the longer term it will also provide the infrastructure to enable long form presentations of digital scholarship (the monographs of the future?) to be published."

Hydra in a Box

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Digital Public Library of America

Stanford University

DuraSpace

2015-2017

$2,000,000

See: https://hyku.samvera.org



HydraDAM2: Extending Fedora 4 and Hydra for Media Preservation
(now known as PHYDO)

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

Indiana University

WGBH

2015-2017

$399,239

  1. Extend the HydraDAM digital asset management system to operate on Fedora 4

  2. Develop Fedora 4 content models for audio and video preservation objects, including descriptive, structural, and digital provenance metadata, based on current standards and best practices and utilizing new features in Fedora 4 for storage and indexing of RDF

  3. Implement support in HydraDAM for two different storage models, appropriate to different types of institutions:

    1. direct management of media files stored on spinning disk or on tape in a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system; and

    2. indirect management and tracking of media files stored offline on LTO tapes

  4. Integrate HydraDAM into preservation workflows that feed access systems at IU (Avalon) and WGBH (OpenVault) and conduct testing of large files and high-throughput workflows

  5. Document and disseminate information about our implementation and experience to the library, archive, digital repository, and audiovisual preservation communities

http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/12/neh-grants-digital-preservation.shtml and PHYDO project wiki

Zotero-Hydra Integration

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

George Mason University (Zotero)

Penn State University

(Ellysa Stern Cahoy)

2014-2015

$440,000

Summary: This project will customize Zotero and create a linkage between Zotero and Hydra-based repositories.  It will add functionality to the Zotero client software to allow users to assert authorship over their own scholarship and to indicate whether they hold the copyright to such materials. It will also develop a pluggable backend for Zotero that will allow any repository to draw such content from the Zotero ecosystem. The first implementation will involve linking Penn State’s IR, ScholarSphere, a Fedora repository built on a Hydra-based platform.  The results of this collaboration will provide open-source code for others in the Hydra community and an open API for adopters of other repository software (e.g., DSpace, Islandora, EPrints) to link institutional and subject repositories to Zotero.

See http://news.psu.edu/story/312098/2014/04/15/academics/penn-state-awarded-mellon-grant-study-personal-scholarly-archiving

ORCID-Hydra Integration

ORCID & Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

University of Notre Dame

2013

In October, 2013, the University of Notre Dame was awarded a grant from ORCID and the Sloan foundation to build an integration between ORCID and a Hydra based IR application.

The Hydra ORCID Integrator Plug-in can be re-used by any Project Hydra institution implementing the Hydra stack/ Fedora Commons to integrate their Institutional Repository (IR) with ORCID. The prototype plugin will be open-source code shared during the first months of the project on github and employed within CurateND, the University of Notre Dame’s institutional repository which is a project Hydra implementation. The proposed project to create an ORCID integrator will benefit all Project Hydra members seeking to implement ORCID iDs within their repositories and will be facilitated by a Project Hydra code sharing event planned midway through the funded effort to ensure successful uptake by multiple institutions.

Award Announcement 

HydraDAM

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

WGBH

2012-2015

$250,000

The development of a comprehensive, open-source digital asset management system for moving image and audio humanities collections.

This project will build and implement an open source digital media preservation and DAM system, focused primarily on the needs of public media stations but relevant and applicable to all cultural institutions with moving image and audio materials. We will face the challenge of handling both large and small media files in several formats. Based on the Hydra technology stack, including the Fedora repository and the Blacklight discovery interface, it will reflect TRAC trusted repository guidelines. We will use and develop open code that will be publicly shared, clearly research and document implementation needs, implement the open source solution as a new model of digital asset management at WGBH, and test the ease of implementation at two partner public media organizations – South Carolina Educational Television Network (SCETV) and Public Radio International (PRI).

Variations on Video: Building the Next Generation Library Media Management System (supported initial development of Avalon Media System)

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Indiana University

Northwestern University



2011-2015

$947,891

Summary: The Avalon Media System is an open source system for managing and providing access to large collections of digital audio and video. The freely available system enables libraries and archives to easily manage and provide online access to their collections for purposes of teaching, learning and research. The Avalon community is made up of a dozen educational, media and open-technology institutions. The project is led by the libraries of Indiana University Bloomington and Northwestern University and is funded in part by a three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Based on the Hydra framework, Fedora repository, Blacklight search, and Solr indexing, Avalon fits well with existing and emerging open repository solutions for long-term digital object management.

Variations on Video IMLS Collaborative Planning Grant

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Indiana University

2010-2011

$49,452

Supported planning for development of Avalon Media System