2021 Samvera Connect : Program

Slides can be found in the Samvera Community Repository, and recordings can be viewed on the Samvera Connect 2021 playlist.

Day 1 - Monday, October 18, 11am - 2pm Eastern Daylight Time

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

11:00-11:10

Welcome and Housekeeping

Welcome

Heather Greer Klein (Samvera)

11:10am - 11:30am

The New Samvera Code of Conduct & Anti-Harassment policy

A review of the Samvera Code of Conduct & Anti-Harassment policy.

Hannah Frost (Stanford University Libraries)

11:30am - 11:50am

State of the Samvera Community

Our annual roundup of all that has happened in the Community this year and where we're headed next.

Carolyn Caizzi (Northwestern University Libraries)

11:50am - 12:00pm

Break

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12:00pm - 12:30pm

Academic Equity through Trauma-Informed Practices: Making Repositories Sustainable for Researchers with Lived Experience

Across the humanities and social sciences, impacted communities have criticized researchers for producing literature that reinscribes stereotypes, myths, and misinformation through academic practices that view marginalized communities as inherently outside of academia. There has been movement in recent years to course-correct through centering the scholarship of people with lived experience, and yet many of the systems researchers rely on remain unchanged -- systems that were not created to support the scholarship of impacted people.

People from marginalized communities have higher statistical rates of trauma, making trauma-informed practices across academia an issue of equity and sustainability. Institutions that do not prioritize trauma-informed practice will not be able to recruit, educate, or retain students and researchers who have lived experience.

Libraries form a part of these structures that can either further alienate already marginalized researchers, or facilitate their work. Metadata librarians are already working on projects such as updating subject headings and using conscious editing to update descriptions. In order to continue to foster scholarship that is meaningful and relevant, digital repositories can build on and extend this work to make the materials they contain more accessible to researchers from impacted communities through trauma-informed equity practices.

Max Kadel (Data Curation Experts) and Chris Ash (Independent Consultant)

12:30pm - 1:00pm

What are Samvera Design Principles?

The UX Interest Group will present on new Samvera Design Principles, which have been developed this past year with input from various application stakeholders. These principles are intended to support developers, administrators and end users during product design, development and evaluation of current applications. The group will also discuss next steps in adoption and how you can get involved.

Adam J. Arling (Northwestern University) and Carla Arton (University of Virginia Library)

1:00pm - 1:20pm

Working & Interest Group Updates

Updates from the Component Maintenance Working Group; Marketing Working Group; Repository Management Interest Group; and UX Interest Group.

Heather Greer Klein (Samvera),
James Griffin
(Princeton University Library), Adam J. Arling (Northwestern University), Chris Awre (University of Hull)

1:20pm - 1:30pm

Break

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1:30pm - 2:00pm

Story Mapping to align and prioritize your teamā€™s feature development

Story mapping is a great way to engage teams to align and prioritize the features they want to build or enhance.

During a story mapping exercise the team goes through the process of brainstorming and documenting the many possible user stories associated with a feature or set of features. With the focus on business and user value, each story is then prioritized to ensure the team builds the right things - at the right time - and for the right reasons. Team members gain perspective and shared context while working in both the problem and solution spaces.

In this session, weā€™ll walk through a story mapping exercise using Miro, one of our favorite virtual whiteboarding and visual collaboration tools.

Rachel Lynn
(Data Curation Experts) and Norm Orstad (Data Curation Experts)

2:00pm - 2:30pm

Lightning Talks

Author Profile Synching with ORCID in Hyku

Doxxing: Prevention and Recovery

IIIF React Media Player: A Component Library

We would like to play a short demo of the integration between the Author profile (in Hyku) and ORCID we developed as part of the Advancing Hyku project. The integration allows repository depositors and authors to establish and control synchronization of works between the repository and ORCID. Based on the chosen settings within the author profile (always synch, ask before manually synching individual works, do not synch), when a work is deposited using the ORCID metadata field all relevant creators can have their ORCID account updated with that work. Conversely, the Author profile in Hyku can be updated, depending on the chosen settings, with info and work DOIs available in ORCID.


Doxxing is a particularly nasty form of online abuse where someone's personal information is shared on the Internet without their permission, often in a way calculated to hurt a person's career, relationships, and self-image. Doxxing happens most often to people with marginalized identities (race, gender, sexuality, etc). This talk will discuss some of the ways to protect yourself, and even more importantly, some of the ways that institutions and communities can offer protection, so that targeted colleagues can more fully participate in online culture.


IIIF React media player is a component library, which can be integrated into an application via NPM. It consumes a 3.0 presentation manifest and renders a media player, a structured navigation component, and a transcript component. The latest addition is the transcript component, which can render a set of transcript data alongside the media player.

Elisa Pettinelli Barrett (Ubiquity Press)

Bess Sadler (Princeton University Library)

Dananji Withana (Indiana University Libraries)

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Day 2 - Tuesday, October 19, 11am - 2pm Eastern Daylight Time

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

11:00-11:10

Welcome and Housekeeping

Welcome

Ilkay Holt (The British Library)

11:10am - 12:10pm

Technology Updates: Avalon, Hyrax, Hyku, Valkyrie

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Jon Cameron (Indiana University)

Julie Hardesty (Indiana University)

Kevin Kochanski
(Notch8)

Trey Pendragon
Digital Library (Princeton University Library)

12:10pm - 12:20pm

Break

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12:20pm - 1:00pm

Hyku Projects Panel: In the Community and In the Wild

Join leads from Hyku projects in various stages (active implementation, nearing launch, and ramping up) for a lively session. We will start with brief updates on work done this past year across our projects on prioritizing community features. Included will be discussion about what works in local installations, what works (and doesnā€™t) when contributing code back to the community core, and how we collaborate across projects in formal (shared Hyku Roadmap, meetings, documentation) and informal (Slack, email, telepathy?!?) ways. We will end the panel with an open call for community input on future community Hyku development priorities.

Ellen Catz Ramsey (University of Virginia)

Ilkay Holt (The British Library)

Jenny Basford (The British Library)

Sara Gould (The British Library)

Amanda Hurford (PALNI)

1:00pm - 1:20pm

Working & Interest Group Updates

Updates from the Roadmaps Alignment Group; Metadata Interest Group; and Branch Renaming Working Group.

Jen Young (Northwestern University Libraries)

Kate Lynch (Princeton University Library)

Nora Zimmerman (Lafayette College)

1:20pm - 1:30pm

Break

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1:30pm - 2:00pm

Chugging Along - Surfliner 3 years later

The collaborative effort between the UC San Diego Library and the UC Santa Barbara Library is still going strong. Find out whatā€™s changed after sharing resources and product development goals over the last year. What needs more work, where are we finding our strengths, and how havenā€™t we run out of train puns yet? The two campus project leads will walk you through sharing teams and having a stakeholder base that is across two campuses! If youā€™re looking to learn how to collaborate with another university, this is the session for you.

Chrissy Rissmeyer
(UC Santa Barbara)

Jessica Hilt
(UC San Diego)

2:00pm - 2:30pm

At the Station: Building the Surfliner Architecture

The collaborative effort between the UC San Diego Library and the UC Santa Barbara Library (called Project Surfliner, after the train that connects the two cities) to share development teams to work on a common digital library platform is going strong after almost three years. Building from Samvera core components and taking a radically iterative, requirements driven approach, our team has slowly articulated a new architecture.

This talk will focus on how our services fit together and how we've made our choices so far. Particular attention will be paid to how our collaborative practices and commitment to cross campus deployment have influenced our technical direction.

Alexandra Dunn (UCSB Library)

Tamsin Johnson (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Matt Critchlow

2:40pm - 3:15pm

Poster Q&A: Avalon IIIF Player Transcript Support

Join us for a discussion around Avalon and transcript handling using our Avalon IIIF Player. Anyone interested in discussing the player, streaming media or IIIF more generally is welcome to join.

Jon Cameron
(Indiana University)

Dananji Withana
(Indiana University)

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Day 3 - Wednesday, October 20, 11am - 2pm Eastern Daylight Time

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

11:00-11:10

Welcome and Housekeeping

Welcome

Kevin Kochanski
Client Liaison, Notch8

11:10am - 11:40am

Tuning IIIF Image Performance in Hyrax and Cantaloupe

It's pretty easy to get Hyrax up and running with Cantaloupe as your IIIF server. However, using both applicationsā€™ default configurations typically results in really disappointing image load times for anything but the simplest and smallest images.

DCE has helped a number of clients tune their implementations based on specific local constraints and infrastructure. Based on this work, we wanted to find some patterns that would be reusable in future projects. We recently invested two internal sprints toward figuring out the most impactful changes that could be made to the default configurations in the two applications.

In this talk, weā€™ll walk through a number of experiments we ran, and highlight which yielded improved performance for initial image loading, as well as which improved interactive viewing including paging, panning, and zooming.

Mark Bussey

11:40am - 12:10pm

Final Draft: A Tour of the New Hyrax Analytics Features

Join the team behind the new Hyrax Analytics features for a sneak peek at the nearly-final interface for the analytics dashboard for collections and works, as well new reporting functionality! We'll show you exports, show pages, and graphs galore for Google Analytics and open source provider Matomo.

April Rieger (Notch8)

Sara Gharacheh (Notch8)

Franny Gaede
Director (University of Oregon Libraries)

Margaret Mellinger (Oregon State University & Pres)

12:10pm - 12:20pm

Break

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12:20pm - 1:00pm

Hyrax Maintenance Working Group Storytime

Join current and former members of the Hyrax Maintenance Working Group as we share stories and successes and other things that have happened while participating in this ever-present but sometimes invisible working group. How has it changed over the years and what are we up to these days? What is it like to participate in a working group sprint? Do you have to be a developer to be part of the Hyrax Maintenance Working Group? A lot, itā€™s great, and no are the short answers - join us and weā€™ll tell you all about it!

Jessica Hilt
(UC San Diego)

Jose Blanco
(University of Michigan)

Daniel Pierce
(Indiana University)

Rebekah Kati (University of North Carolina)

Dananji Withana
(Indiana University)

1:00pm - 1:20pm

Working & Interest Group Updates

Updates from the Hyrax Developer Support and Engagement Working Group; Hyrax Interest Group; and Hyrax Maintenance Working Group.

Julie Hardesty
(Indiana University)

Heather Greer Klein (Samvera)

1:20pm - 1:30pm

Break

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1:30pm - 2:00pm

Bulkrax: Getting Data In and Out of Repositories

Import and Export are vital parts of our repositories. Getting data in can be time consuming and error prone and getting it back out again is often left as a future activity. Bulkrax provides a framework to quickly and easily build import and export in various formats. We'll go over the basics of using Bulkrax and talk briefly about what goes in to setting up a new format, then touch on future plans.

Rob Kaufman (Notch8)

2:00pm - 2:30pm

All Aboard for Fedora 6.0: Release, Updates & The Road Ahead

Our presentation will focus on the latest version of Fedora, Fedora 6.0, how we got there, and specific areas of interest for those in the Samvera Community. We will highlight the most important features available in 6.0 and share migration progress reports and successes from community members. Much of the work done was supported by an IMLS grant-funded project to pilot upgrades to Fedora 6.0 and create a toolkit for others in the community to use in their efforts to adopt and migrate to the latest version of the software and we will share the Grant progress and what this means for Fedora 6.0 users.

We will also talk about our plans for the future of the Fedora program and how we plan to utilize community input to focus our efforts.

Daniel Bernstein

Arran Griffith (LYRASIS)

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Day 4 - Thursday, October 21, 11am - 2pm Eastern Daylight Time

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

11:00-11:10

Welcome and Housekeeping

Welcome

Rick Johnson
(University of Notre Dame)

11:10am - 11:40am

serverless-iiif: Putting the SAM in Samvera

serverless-iiif started as a small proof of concept and has since grown to be a reliable, fast, streamlined, and cost-effective way to serve IIIF resources at scale. This presentation will discuss the transition of serverless-iiif from a bespoke Northwestern project to a Samvera Labs project with multiple contributors. It will also cover work towards flexibility and ease of install as well as future plans for the project.

Michael B. Klein (Northwestern University)

11:40am - 12:10pm

The Long and Winding Road: Transitioning from IIIF Presentation 2.0 to 3.0

Recently our dev team began the process of generating IIIF Presentation 3.0 Manifests to represent digitized Collection items. An ongoing discussion throughout the years of how, when and why to plunge into IIIF Presentation 3.0 took a turn towards action within the past month. During project planning for new, NPM delivered repository UI multimedia features, we reasoned building from a defined spec (IIIF manifest structure), saved UI developers from attempting to define ad hoc APIs specific to Northwestern Libraries needs. This presentation will tell our story (which many of you may share?) of why our team decided against generating 3.0 IIIF manifests in the past, what changed our minds, and our very recent initial steps and processes put in place moving from IIIF Presentation 2.0 to 3.0. By no means a right way necessarily, just our experiences we strive to learn from week to week, shared with anyone interested or encountering a similar scenario.

Karen Shaw
(Northwestern University)

Adam J. Arling
(Northwestern University)

Mat Jordan
(Northwestern University)

12:10pm - 12:20pm

Break

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12:20pm - 12:50pm

How to set your developers up for success (and grow your team in the process)

My team has a long time strategy of hiring less experienced developers from unique backgrounds and successfully growing these developers for long term success. We have been evolving our approach over time, and this talk is about the strategies that we are using now. After this session, you will come away with a strategy to open your hiring to a wider variety of developers and grow them into confident and dedicated senior developers.

Lea Ann Bradford (Notch8)

12:50pm - 1:00pm

Working & Interest Group Updates

An invitation to form a new Developer Onboarding Working Group.

Maria Whitaker (Indiana University)

1:00pm - 1:20pm

Lightning Talks

Security, Monitoring, and Auditing Hyrax App

Reflections on our First Year with a Community Manager

The purpose of this lightning talk is to share some of the tools and strategies we use to secure (Rapid7/Brakeman), monitor (AWS Cloudwatch/X-Ray), and audit (bundler-audit) our Hyrax application. It will also include a brief survey and explanation of our change management policies here at the University of Cincinnati, then ending with a possible discussion around Security and Accessibility in our Samvera community.


The conference marks my first year as Samvera Community Manager, and my interview presentation for the position asked me to describe what I hoped to accomplish in my first year in the role. I'll revisit that presentation to reflect on the past year and look to what I hope to help the Community accomplish in the next 12 months.

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1:20pm - 1:30pm

Break

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1:30pm - 2:00pm

Integrating undergraduate students into a development team

We will present the process weā€™ve implemented at Princeton University Library to bring undergraduate students onto our team as fully-contributing, issue-closing developers. Hear from one full-time developer and 3 part-time (undergraduate) developers about the origin of this project and how weā€™ve done hiring, training, mentoring, and onboarding.

Eliot Jordan
(Princeton University Library)


Xander Gardner

Thanya Begum
(Princeton University Library)

Anna Headley
(Princeton University Library)

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Day 5 - Friday, October 22, 11am - 2pm Eastern Daylight Time

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

Time

Title

Abstract

Presenters

11:00-11:10

Welcome and Housekeeping

Welcome

Heather Greer Klein (Samvera)

11:10am - 12:10pm

Keynote: Digital Archiving-in-Process as Reparative Practice

Why archive in real time? Digital objects are highly ephemeral, subject to changes to platform technologies, creator resources and physical infrastructure (hard drives, computers, servers, etc.). Many view native-digital objects as disposable, given the immense volume produced and "amateur" or low-budget production value. Yet digital technologies have also expanded who gets to tell stories and the diversity of stories we see. Preserving these artifacts are critical to our understanding of rapidly shifting and expanding cultural discourses in the 21st century. Digital archiving-in-process offers opportunities for community engagement and restorative justice in media and culture. By engaging artists in creating and distributing digital artifacts, we can support the training and development of communities that have been historically excluded from existing archives due to the marginalization in cultural systems. Positioning the OTV | Open Television platform as a living digital archive through its support of the development and distribution of low-budget film, television and video showcasing intersectionality, I show the value of expanding archival practice to include the active creation of new work and preservation of digital objects as they are made. This practice repairs the historical exclusion of cultural productions by artists marginalized because of their race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability and citizenship status.

Aymar Jean Christian
(Northwestern University)

12:10pm - 12:20pm

Break

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12:20pm - 12:50pm

Meeting Collaborators Wherever They Are: Figgyā€™s role in democratizing access and facilitating global contributions to Ephemera Collections at Princeton University Library

The development of Princeton University Libraryā€™s digital repository (Figgy) and the associated workflows for item-level description of the Latin American Ephemera Collection lay the foundation for a growing number of geographically and linguistically diverse digital ephemera collections at PUL. With the addition of each new collection, comes new questions and use cases that drive how PUL prioritizes enhancements for Figgy. User needs for one particular area - South Asia - introduced new and exciting use cases that guided both repository feature enhancements and innovative new workflows to support collaborators overseas and the description needs for the ephemera materials that they contributed to the repository.

Ellen Ambrosone
(Princeton University)

Kim Leaman

12:50pm - 1:20pm

Background Jobs - Sidekiq Pro & You

We'll step through a few use cases for why you might be using background jobs, some common pitfalls and patterns, and how Princeton's begun to solve them by using features available in Sidekiq Pro.

Trey Pendragon
(Princeton University Library)

1:20pm - 1:30pm

Break

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1:30pm - 2:30pm

Lightning Talks

Jen Young -- Changing the subject: thinking globally, acting locally

Andrew Myers -- Hyrax Developer Support & Engagement w/ Plugins

ames Halliday, Adam Ploshay, and Daniel Pierce -- Collections at IU: AllinsonFlex, Bulkrax and digital workflows

James Griffin -- Ouranos: Automating Deployment with Capistrano

Brendan Quinn -- Using mocks to test external dependencies in an Elixir application

Chris Colvard -- Pulling weeds and plating seeds: tending the Samvera ecosystem through pull requests

Changing the subject: thinking globally, acting locally
Demonstrating the creation and use of local authorities to mitigate bias in subject headings in Northwestern's digital collections repository.


Hyrax Developer Support & Engagement w/ Plugins
The Hyrax Development Support & Engagement WG wondered if there's any interest in picking up where the Hyrax Plugins WG left off in attempting to establish a well-documented pattern for extending Hyrax through plugins/extensions, in particular leveraging Hyrax callbacks as a way to do that. As the facilitator of the Hyrax Plugins WG (now over) I offered to talk about those efforts and whether they could help the goals of the Development Support & Engagement WG.


Collections at IU: AllinsonFlex, Bulkrax and digital workflows
AllinsonFlex is a new gem developed by Notch8 for incorporating flexible metadata into Hyrax applications using standards-based metadata schemes. Our talk will focus on how Indiana University Libraries uses this gem in our new Digital Collections repository, along with Notch8-developed Bulkrax for ingest.


Ouranos: Automating Deployment with Capistrano
Ouranos is a Ruby on Rails application developed in order to automate the deployment of applications using Capistrano and the GitHub Deployments API. The aim of this Lightning Talk is to provide an overview of this small project, as well as a brief overview of its usage within the deployment life cycle of web services.


Using mocks to test external dependencies in an Elixir application
I'll briefly describe how we have adopted the use of mocks in our Elixir tests. Testing external APIs is a perennial issue across languages and frameworks, and I'll go over some benefits and drawbacks to our approach. For comparison, I will give a brief overview of how we use the ex_vcr library as an alternatives to using mocks.


Pulling weeds and plating seeds: tending the Samvera ecosystem through pull requests
The garden of Samvera code, devops tooling, and documentation live in version controlled repositories which we collectively tend. The Pull Request is the tool we have to dig, hoe, and cultivate our soil so it will grow abundantly. This lightning talk will explain how to make pull requests to Samvera core components and what to expect in the pull request process. After learning the basics everyone can be a gardener!

Daniel Pierce
(Indiana University)

James Halliday
(Indiana University)


Adam Ploshay
(Indiana University Library Technologies)


Jen Young
(Northwestern University Libraries)


Brendan Quinn
(Northwestern University Libraries)

Andrew Myers
(WGBH)

James Griffin
(Princeton University Library)

Chris Colvard
(Indiana University)



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