Hyku Documentation

What is Hyku?

Hyku is a digital repository application for managing cultural heritage content, which began as the Hydra-in-a-Box project. Based on Hyrax, it offers an easy-to-install, easy-to-configure, feature-rich solution supporting next-generation web technologies. Hyku reduces barriers to effective asset management and preservation for collections and content types of many kinds, and is supported by a vibrant and ever-growing open source community.

Building on Hyrax, Hyku has a long list of features and distinctions, including:

  • Multi-tenancy, or the ability to host multiple repository “slices” within the same application, each with its own users, objects, and look & feel

  • Support for the IIIF Image and Presentation APIs

  • Support for harvesting metadata and content via ResourceSync

  • Rich object viewing using the Universal Viewer

  • Two bundled work types: Image Work and Generic Work

  • and more!

Hyku Beta 2.0.0 was released in October 2018 and Hyku was promoted out of Samvera Labs in February 2019. Information about the initial Beta Test can be found below and user documentation is being added to this site regularly.

Hyku 3.0 was released in early 2021, bringing Hyku up to speed with Hyrax, and introducing new theming and other configurations.

Hyku 4.0 was released in May 2022, offering several major new features including cross-tenant search, three new UI theming templates that can be implemented from the Admin appearance dashboard, the ability to make tenants private, to feature collections, and to support multiple domains per tenant.

Hyku 5.0 was released in February 2023, offering the ability to use Solr graph queries to skip having to do nested indexing. Features include Groups with Roles and the ability to implement Google or Motomo analytics. 

Visit the Hyku YouTube Channel for feature demos and the latest updates.