Hydra roadmap and community engagement

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
2 min read


This page has been superseded by the projectHydra.org web site sections on philosophy, technology and community framework as of 2011.


The bulk of this page derives from a session at LibDevConX held at Stanford in March 2010. It is an attempt to summarise a lot about Hydra, its philosophy and its direction in a small space! If you have editing rights on this wiki, please feel free to add information into sections 2 (who is using Hydra?) and 3 (use cases) so that this becomes an active reflection of work being done on and with Hydra. (See entry 3ci as an example.)

  1. What is Hydra?
    1. Vision
      1. Provide a set of "lego bricks" and Fedora-based "solutions bundles" to let institutions build and quickly deploy highly tailored applications for their local content and workflow needs.
    2. Philosophy: One body, many heads
      1. No one size fits all approach to repository needs
      2. No single institution can bear the longterm load of a comprehensive solution in this space
    3. Technical Framework
      1. Fedora
      2. Services
      3. integration with workflow
      4. Solr
      5. Blacklight
      6. Active Fedora / Hydra
    4. CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete)
      1. CUD = Hydra with Active Fedora
      2. R = Blacklight
    5. Community Framework
      1. Hull, Stanford, Virginia Universities
      2. DuraSpace
      3. MediaShelf
      4. Blacklight
      5. Others who may choose to get involved???
  2. Who is using it?
    1. Supporting its development
      1. University of Hull, UK
      2. University of Prince Edward Island, Canada (Hydra is working with the Islandora team there on common approaches and components)
      3. Stanford University
      4. University of Virginia
      5. The Blacklight development team
      6. Fedora Commons (part of DuraSpace)
      7. MediaShelf LLC
      8. University of Notre Dame
    2. Using It
      1. University of Hull
      2. Stanford University
      3. University of Virginia
      4. University of Notre Dame
    3. Interested in it
      1.  
  3. Use cases
    (use cases in upright text are in production or active development, use cases in italic text are being considered)
    1. ETDs (Electronic thesis or dissertation submission: Stanford University)
    2. Digital archiving / Special collections (SALT: Stanford University & AIMS Project: Hull, Stanford, Virginia, Yale Universities)
    3. Institutional repository (University of Hull)
      1. The University of Hull has been running a Fedora-based institutional repository for more than two years using Muradora as the 'public' UI. The intention is to switch to a Hydra compliant system for the academic year 2010/11. The repository covers a wide range of content (text, images, multimedia, data, learning objects, ...) and generally uses layered security (public access, staff and student only, staff only).
    4. Hydrangea (Demo app of Hydra stack) (Hydra community framework - all partners)
    5. PDF accessioning tool (aka EEMS) (Stanford)
    6. MODS metadata editing tool (MediaShelf)
    7. Repository administrative UI (Hydra community framework)
    8. Digitization workflow
    9. MSS / Book management & gallery tool
    10. Image management & gallery tool
    11. Map management & gallery tool
    12. Media management & gallery
      1. media management workflow
      2. archiving the development of a piece of media...
    13. ...?
      1. digital collections tool (to replace contentDM?)
      2. museum collection support tool (3d objects, archeological collections). Access permissions
      3. crowd-sourcing / tagging archival and other collections (a la SALT), making links across collections
      4. research group support --> archiving scientific data
      5. learning objects / course materials repository and/or archive (integration with Sakai, BlackBoard)
      6. personal repositories, portfolio
  4. Communication
    1. Hydra on Fedora wiki (this site)
    2. Google group: hydra-tech@groups.google.com (for those involved in, or just interested in, in Hydra's technical development)
    3. Github
      1. project hydra github account – at http://github.com/projecthydra WARNING: The code on the Github site is work in progress and for now may be extremely volatile.
    4. Committers / Open Tech calls (tba)