Valkyrized Hyrax Community Effort 2023

Owned by Heather Greer Klein
Last updated: Aug 01, 2023 by Kirsten Leonard
2 min read

Pledges Received to Date (May 30, 2023): Total of $53,000

Work completed status update (July 28, 2023)

Work completed status update (June 28, 2023)

Why:

Valkyrie for Hyrax has been a promise to Samvera users for a few years. So much excellent work has been done here, but community resources have been constrained to get it across the line. Completing this work would provide a number of important benefits to the community:

  • Long-desired options beyond Fedora 4 for existing Samvera users, including Postgres or Fedora 6 backed Hyrax

  • Removal of what has been a “let’s wait” blocker for institutions who have delayed upgrades

  • Attractiveness of Samvera solutions to potential adopting institutions who have been hearing about Valkyrie and waiting to act

  • Interest from service providers and a path to keep their engagement in the community viable

Scope:

There are three main milestones that we as a community want to accomplish, to be targeted in this order of priority: 

  • Milestone 1 is to create a fully functioning version of Hyrax that is backed by Postgres. 

  • Milestone 2 is to pave a well-established workflow for live-migrating an existing Fedora 4 backed Hyrax repository to Valkyrie Postgres backed Hyrax repository. 

  • Milestone 3 is to have the Fedora 6 Valkyrie adapter fully working in Hyrax. 

There are two ways you can contribute to this work if Hyrax is important to your institution:

Contribute financially:

The Hyku for Consortia group (PALNI and PALCI) are leading a pledge drive to raise funds to support work sprints through SoftServ to move the Valkyrie for Hyrax work forward in a May-June 2023 series of sprints. The goal is to collect $50,000 - $100,000 in funds to move this work forward as soon as possible.

Pledges Received to Date (May 30, 2023): Total of $53,000

  • Amigos (consortium implementing Hyku): $7500 (Contact: Christine Peterson)

  • British Library: $2000 (Contact: Jenny Basford)

  • Dickinson College (Hyku for Consortia project participant): $500 (Contact: Susan Vandale)

  • Indiana University: $15,000 (Contact Jon Dunn)

  • Northwestern University: $5,000 (Contact Carolyn Caizzi and David Schober)

  • PALNI/PALCI (Hyku for Consortia): Updated to a total of $10,000 (Contact Kirsten Leonard)

  • Samvera Board: $5000 (Contact Esme Cowles)

  • University of Michigan: $8,000 (Contact Bohyun Kim, John Weise)

The pledge drive is focused on Milestone 1 with any remaining funds dedicated to Milestone 2 in the May-June 2023 period.

If you have end of year funds, and would like to support immediate work on this project, please consider joining the pledge. See the scope of work document for full details and how to pledge.

Contribute developer and/or software testing time to the community effort: Multiple institutions will be leading sprints in August & September 2023. More information will be shared soon.