2025 Samvera Board Candidate Statements

Owned by Heather Greer Klein
Nov 26, 2024
4 min read

Karen Cariani, GBH Archives

I have been a member of the Samvera Community since the days of Hydra, and active in various committees over that time. The GBH Archive has been developing and using a Samvera solution, mostly home grown, but also Avalon, for about 10 years to manage an audio-visual collection. I fully believe that community support, communication, and collaboration, even if it is not for a pre-described, pre-packaged software code solution, is important for cultural institutions. Sharing needs, solutions, successes and failures are all critical to moving open source solutions forward. I see the Samvera community embracing the shared knowledge and goals, and some software, as the primary focus of what is Samvera. I look forward to using my past collaborative spirit to help the Samvera community move forward.

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Kirsten Leonard, Executive Director, PALNI (Hyku for Consortia)

I am declaring my candidacy for a second term on the Samvera board. The success of the Samvera Community is important to the success of the consortium that I lead (PALNI), a small academic library consortium seeking partnerships to innovate to ensure our services are relevant and affordable to our institutions, faculty, and staff. My first term on the board and my experience serving as the Partner representative for the PALCI/PALNI Hyku for Consortia project have strengthened my understanding of other community members. I am deeply grateful for the support and collaboration of the Samvera Community and PALNI stakeholders, and I am excited for the opportunity to continue to learn from the work of the wide range of expertise and experience among Samvera innovators, builders, and users. As the executive director of a consortium, I bring extensive experience in strategic planning, financial management, grant seeking, stakeholder communication, market knowledge and consortium partners. This experience has equipped me with the skills and knowledge necessary to contribute effectively to the Samvera board. I and the Hyku for Consortia project partners would like to continue supporting Samvera in this next phase of its growth.

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Paul Walk, Technical Consultant, Antleaf

I am a technical consultant with 35 years experience working with systems supporting learning, teaching and research. The first half of my career was spent working in an institutional context, working for a series of universities in the UK. I then went on to have a more national and international focus, advising on and, in some cases, helping with the development of national and international standards and infrastructure to support academic research and scholarly communication.

In 2017 I left employment to start my consultancy and development company, Antleaf.

Much of my recent work has been in collaboration with the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), acting as the technical lead on initiatives relating to "next generation repositories". The most notable of these developments is the COAR Notify Initiative, which aims to provide a lightweight, asynchronous and universal protocol to allow repositories to interoperate with complementary services (e.g. peer-review services).

I have been working with Samvera software since 2017. Antleaf has worked with a number of clients to build solutions based on Samvera technologies. Some current Samvera-based developments include:

  • Digital WPI, a showcase repository including deep Spotlight integration into Hyrax;

  • NIMS Materials Data Repository, a national data repository for materials science in Japan;

  • ReSeeD, an institutional data repository for Ruhr University Bochum.

Antleaf become a Samvera Partner earlier in 2024.

I think Samvera has some real strengths, such as the thriving and active community, and the relatively rapid technical development and innovation. Samvera now covers a lot of functionality in the repositories "space", and offers real solutions for institutional concerns.

My interest in serving on the Samvera Board stems from the fact that I see some opportunities for Samvera with which I believe I can provide some assistance.

The first of these is based on my working relationships in the areas of national and international standards and infrastructure. I think Samvera could really benefit from a closer engagement with initiatives such as COAR Notify, Signposting, Rioxx etc. and I am in a good position to help with that.

Secondly, two of my current clients have commissioned research-data repositories from Antleaf, and I think that (together with Cottage Labs with whom I work closely), Antleaf now has considerable experience with the strengths and weaknesses of using Samvera components (especially Hyrax) to solve research-data management tasks at scale. I think this could be an interesting area of growth for Samvera.

Thirdly - and perhaps a little more tentatively - I note that Samvera has, hitherto, been primarily successful in North America, with somewhat limited presence in one or two countries in Europe (such as the UK and Germany), but very little beyond this. It is not unusual for a community such as Samvera to be stronger in one region, but the domains of teaching, learning and research are global, and I think Samvera could certainly benefit from a wider presence internationally. In the course of my work, through Antleaf, with various international efforts, I come into close contact with repository communities and networks all over the world, and I think there could be some benefit in considering how Samvera could make some advances in other regions.

I will close by saying that I, Antleaf and its clients have all benefited from Samvera over a number of years, and I would like the chance to collaborate more closely in setting its direction in the next few years.