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New Features and Needs - Proposed, In-Progress, Released
Features and Needs
This page gathers candidate problem areas and enhancements that have surfaced across community conversations, interviews, and implementation experience. It is not a roadmap yet, but rather serves as a shared space for Hyku users, service providers, and stakeholders to record needs, compare priorities, and signal interest. Items here can be expanded, refined, or retired as the community clarifies impact and urgency, and will inform future roadmap planning and development cycles.
This list is agnostic of how and where they would be implemented, and are simply a list from Hyku users. I.e. they may be added to Hyrax main first, become their own gem, or be added directly to Hyku.
Update JULY-2026
Since starting this page, some features (e.g. the Guided CSV Importer which came as a result of Bulk Import Improvements (Bulkrax) (FUNDRAISING ACTIVE)) have graduated from concept to released feature, and even garnered some feedback. We don’t see a reason why we should materially change the layout here (apart from a changed title to be accurate), but please comment if you do.
Released Features
Features released, after they’ve gone through the community prioritization process below. Many of these features came as a result of larger product improvement initiatives, which may remain in progress.
Prior to creating an importer and attempting the import process, Bulkrax (Bulk ingestion tool) should be providing feedback to the user in an easy-to-understand, actionable way. Further, there should be CSV templates based on the bulkrax configuration that the user can download.
Previously, the nature of the feedback was extremely technical, and difficult to understand, and was only generated once the importer is actually started.
All administrators
Slated for release and enabled by default in Hyku 7.2, but added to many production instances in Hyku 7.1.
Notch8
Presumably every single administrator, especially those new to Hyku
Hyku previously required customization to support custom URL structures. It also required additional customization to support forwarding upon a changed human-readable URL.
This initiative has added the ability to support forwarding from previous URLs to canonical Hyku URLs, slugs, and added support for all this in bulk import. This is a win for both current users, and organizations migrating from previous systems to Hyku.
All tenants; especially institutions with large, long-lived collections.
This has been released to production, and included in Hyku 7.2
Frustrated by not being able to retain or define the order of Authors on a work? What about contributor vs creator, and nesting these metadata fields? One of the many problems we seek to solve here is to enable metadata librarians and administrators proper control and flexibility so that nested or hierarchical metadata fields can be displayed in a clear and consistent way to researchers and patrons, while providing proper attributions to actors associated with the respective work.
This is related to handling ORCiD profiles and that metadata schema as well!
Administrators, Metadata Librarians, Researchers
This is slotted for release in Hyku 7.2.
Many
In-Progress Features
This table lists features that are currently undergoing development. They may be in active work or in between phases of development. (Click the title to open table.)
Area / Topic
Description of the Need (Or your pitch: Why it’s important to you)
Who Is Affected
Notes / Early Feedback
Interested Organizations
Funding Organizations
Area / Topic
Description of the Need (Or your pitch: Why it’s important to you)
Prior to creating an importer and attempting the import process, Bulkrax (Bulk ingestion tool) should be providing feedback to the user in an easy-to-understand, actionable way. Further, there should be CSV templates based on the bulkrax configuration that the user can download.
Currently, the nature of the feedback is extremely technical, and difficult to understand, and is only generated once the importer is actually started.
All administrators
Notch8
Presumably every single administrator, especially those new to Hyku
Creating single works can be a confusing and painful process for users who aren’t repository administrators. Many terms and relationships are shrouded in hyku-specific terminology. A researcher tasked with submitting their own works, especially if they are non-traditional researchers who may be submitting into custom work types, experience confusion and overwhelm.
Users unfamiliar with repository systems (e.g. researchers and students)
Hyku currently requires customization to support custom URL structures. It also requires additional customization to support forwarding upon a changed human-readable URL.
The desired functionality, as we understand it, is that a given work or collection can have any number of supported URLs that may cover past versions as well as a primary (current) version to which all others are forwarded. It will also have a hyku permalink that would not be a human-readable structure, that contains a persistent UUID in the URL.
This would provide an easier and significantly more robust system for citation and migration.
All tenants; especially institutions with large, long-lived collections.
Repeated request across interviews; early adopters paid for customizations that did not re-enter core.
This would likely require some work to persist all associated URLs for works, and enable administrators to view / modify / delete them as appropriate.
UofL had this work done and is visible in our current live site, but it has yet to be brought into core code.
Frustrated by not being able to retain or define the order of Authors on a work? What about contributor vs creator, and nesting these metadata fields? One of the many problems we seek to solve here is to enable metadata librarians and administrators proper control and flexibility so that nested or hierarchical metadata fields can be displayed in a clear and consistent way to researchers and patrons, while providing proper attributions to actors associated with the respective work.
Administrators, Metadata Librarians, Researchers
This is related to handling ORCiD profiles and that metadata schema as well!
Migrations to the latest Hyku from much earlier versions / other platforms often difficult: enable easier migrations
There’s a lot of styling overhead to starting from scratch with a brand-new tenant: enable new organizations to import a “jumping off point” - a fully-functional, mature tenant or organization’s configuration, including styling and custom CSS
Testing the many different ways tenants can be configured is difficult, putting platform quality at risk: enable testing of tenant-specific behaviors / reproduce tenant-specific bugs
lay the groundwork for improved test automation with key testing tenant configurations + datasets (and known configurations)
Notch8 has started this work to augment the Hyku demo experience, as a sales enabler.
This is contingent on a migration from worktypes as customizable objects to a unified worktype with configurable sub-types. cc: @Rob Kaufman@Nic Don Stanton-Roark
Pitt
Notch8
Amigos
DOI Minting Workflow Enhancements
Streamlined minting (DataCite or Crossref), clearer admin UI, troubleshooting tools.
IR tenants; research libraries; any institution doing persistent ID management.
This will be part of the work undertaken as part of PRI / Enact with University of Westminster / CoSector
PALNI / PALCI
University of Westminster
Proposed Work
Free Text Search within Works
I am getting a request for us to see if we can mimic what Chronicling America is doing on their advance search page, on specially free text search. As an example if I wanted to look up works that happen to use the words coal mining I would like to see the results appear back that have those words appear. This could be for Coal, Mining, and Coal Mining.
From there when I view the work in the player I would like it so that those words are highlighted so that I can zoom into that instance and be able to read it in the context that is there. Here are some examples:
Weird Edge Cases
When I search I would like to have the ability to add wild card text as a means to do more broad searching.
Examples:
Z* - Every word that begins with Z
Z???? - 5 letter words beginning with Z
???Z - 4 Letter words ending with Z
len8 - Eight letter words
len8-3 - Eight letter words followed by a three letter word
len10[??Z] - Ten letter words, in which the third letter is Z
len10[??Z*G] - Ten letter words, in which the third letter is Z and the last letter is G
Additionally allow me to tell the system that I do not know the correct spelling and suggest what it could be from a list before performing the search (think of this like an suggestion search on a web browser or search engine).
These can then be combined with the existing facets to narrow down the results so that I can make the list manageable enough to sort through.
Area / Topic
Description of the Need (Or your pitch: Why it’s important to you)
Who Is Affected
Notes / Early Feedback
Interested Organizations
Area / Topic
Description of the Need (Or your pitch: Why it’s important to you)
Currently, there is fear and uncertainty around large file (or quantity) uploads. The current functionality regarding chunked uploads often works. However, when it doesn’t, it is often difficult for users to understand what restrictions on uploads are from their admins vs which are technical errors or defects.
Repository administrators
Depositors
Libraries must be able to:
import large files, one at a time and via Bulkrax. Currently, the system cannot import files over ??GB. Videos in particular can be this size and larger, as well as high-resolution images and maps.
Import a large number of files via Bulkrax. Currently, the system has a difficult time importing over ?? files at one time. Libraries have had to chunk these files to get them into repositories. Technically, there should not be a limit to the number, assuming the infrastructure can support it.
If there is a limit, it should be communicated on the upload page
It is generally a need to leverage multiple controlled vocabularies for a given metadata field – this is the way most (all?) metadata librarians often work. It’s difficult, time-consuming work, and represents an opportunity to make that work much easier.
Enable Hyku to support mapping any metadata fields (e.g. Subject Heading, Person, Geographic Location, etc) to any number of authority sources (e.g. LOC, MESH, Wikidata, OCLC, Local) through a separate field on import.
Enable the Repository administrator to automate the mappings based on the metadata value itself (assuming it is unique), via the upload of a mapping file / or via a UI.
Metadata Librarians, Repository Administrators, Patrons and Researchers
DOT has some enhanced functionality in these areas, code needs to be extracted from their project and contributed back to Hyku main.
WVU
Presumably all users - this is just how it should work.
Amigos
Libraries already using ArchivesSpace will likely be looking for LCNAF integration
Ability to grant or restrict access based on campus IP ranges; needed for reading-room models or licensed material.
Archives, special collections, and institutions with on-site access requirements.
Known gap; repeatedly requested for both IR and cultural heritage contexts.
UW
Tufts
PALNI / PALCI
Amigos
EZproxy Compatibility
improved functionality when proxied through EZproxy for off-campus users.
Institutions using EZ Proxy to enable off-campus access to materials with on-campus or institution-only access.
May be combined with IP-Based Permissions
UW
Willow SWORD API
Willow SWORD is a primary method for interoperability and ingestion of works and collections from external systems (e.g. Symplectic Elements, ProQuest). The user base and market interest for this API is increasing.
Right now, documentation, testing, and feature completion is relatively immature (we have MVP-level support for Willow SWORD API v2, and none for v3, and we need to continue testing and support for v2 resources with Flexible Metadata enabled.
We gotta continue the investment into the feature set and maintenance of it.
UW
Pitt / PALs
Custom Thumbnails
Right now, the default process for thumbnail generation yields suboptimal results (e.g. black screenshot for a video).
Submitting a custom thumbnail is preferable, and an ability of other repository systems (e.g. DSpace)
Amigos
Metadata-only should [gracefully] show for restricted (i.e. full-content) works.
In Hyrax, lots of it needs the metadata exposed to the public, but the content playback or images. Right now, it looks like an error:
Needs stronger testing and documentation; frequently cited as fragile. H4C planning enhancements for user collection support; URL link back to work/file page.
Amigos
Pitt
Handle System Support
Support for persistent identifiers via Handle;
IR tenants; research libraries; any institution doing persistent ID management.
Raised by multiple institutions as missing infrastructure for long-term stability.
PALNI / PALCI
Amigos
ORCID Integration (read/write)
Link authors with their their research work; exchange data with the ORCID Registry to populate local author profiles; update ORCID records with publication information each time a repository deposit is made
Allow repository administrators to customize the header and footer to include not just colors, but removing default links and adding their own. Allow each tenant to create their own custom header and/or footer in a multitenant environment.
Repository administrators
An Amigos library has asked for a custom footer in the multitenant environment.
Amigos
Restoring non-GA overlapping functionality of Reports section
With Google Analytics 4 functionality now functional in Hyku, the Reports section, which provided some different data, is blank except for the Users section. It would be nice to remove this section for now, and when decisions have been made on what data is needed to supplement GA4, bring it back.
Repository administrators, authors
A blank section in the Dashboard makes repository administrators wonder if there is something wrong with that section, or if there are others like in in other parts of the software. Here is a bit on what used to be there: https://youtu.be/XHpE9iqX1cQ?si=er_QAcCXKZEvIekR&t=298
Amigos
Pitt?
Providing Link to IIIF Manifest
When preparing an exhibit of works, it would be nice to reuse the works' manifests in the exhibit, rather than downloading files and having to recreate them in order to embed them into an exhibit.
Some parent/child relationships may have unique metadata at the child level. Hyrax’s NewspaperWorks gem accommodates this need, but it is not currently in Hyku core code.
Institutions with archival materials in Hyku
UofL had this work done and is visible in our current live site, but it has yet to be brought into core code.
UofL
Add text work type for textual materials that are not OERs or ETDs
Newspapers, journals, yearbooks, and the like are frequently found in archival collections. The current default work types and fields do not accommodate them (they have fields like volume and issue, as well as possibly using fields like abstract and table_of_contents currently only associated with oer and etd work types). Aside from other issues with the default URLs, it is not desirable to have a URL include the string generic_work, so adding additional fields to that is not optimal
Institutions with archival materials in Hyku
UofL
Improved sort options
Custom work in version 3 created additional sort fields, such as by source id. The default options of relevance, title, date uploaded, and date published do not accommodate ordering, say, newspapers by date, as sorting by title would put July before June alphabetically, and the other date fields are about back end functions. Adding this custom work back into core code would benefit any institution seeking to make browsing the front end more user-friendly.
Institutions with works that might best be accessed in a particular order
UofL had this work done and is visible in our current live site, but it has yet to be brought into core code.
UofL
Bulkrax Support for Fedora6 with Valkyrie
There are a lot of Bulkrax users on F6 / Hyrax. We want to broaden the userbase of Bulkrax as much as possible.
Fedora 6 users on Hyrax
Not a Hyku need, but a Bulkrax need, ultimately affecting the sustainability of Bulkrax as a dependency.
@Dolsy Smith I didn’t want to lose this need, so I put it here.
Enhanced UV media display
I would like to be able to attach multiple file types (still image, audio, video) to a single work and move between them in the viewer.
Repository administrators
PALNI/PALCI
Enhanced file manager options
I would like to add the ability to 1) exclude specific files from the files list but still have them display in the UV, and/or 2) disable download options for files in the list of files.
Repository administrators
This in some way needs to be interoperable with the download option built into the IIIF viewer. There is broad need to be able to disable downloading of specific files in a tenant, without configuring the entire tenant to be read-only.
PALNI/PALCI
UofL
Bulk updating of metadata in a specific field
Sometimes a repository or a linked resources changes its name or its URL. Sometimes LCSH updates a term and it will need to be changed in the Subject field across the repository. It would be convenient to be able to make these changes globally rather than collection by collection within a tenant.
Repository administrators
The subject term changes may be managed by improved authority linkage.
UofL
AI-assisted metadata generation
Create a free-standing metadata generation app 1) linked to a choice of LLM model, to 2) receive tenant-specific configuration data (CSV template, M3 yaml) for context, 3) read a set of files and 4) produce ready-to-import CSV that user then takes to their tenant.
Repository administrators; metadata librarians and archivists
