Issue 2, February 2017

Hydra-In-A-Box Project Update

Vol 1, Issue 2, February 2017

An email newsletter from the Hydra-in-a-Box team with news and information about community progress, plans, and pilots

ANNOUNCING: Hyku Repository Alpha Release Coming Soon for Community Testing and Feedback

THANKS TO OUR COMMUNITY

The feature-filled Hyku repository is made possible with code contributions from multiple institutions beyond the core project partners. Our community's ongoing involvement ensure a successful 2017 Hyku launch, designed to meet a broad set of needs now and into the future. Recent work has focused on:

• • • Testing bulk loading scripts and doing load-testing of our AWS installation of Hyku
    • Gearing up for our DPLA partners to test Hyku’s ResourceSync implementation, as a mechanism for harvesting from Hyku, which now supports Change Lists in addition to (full) Resource Lists
    • Implementing group management and user management in the administrative dashboard 
    • Better integration between administrative sets and workflows, particularly around aligning roles 
    • Improving the user interface for reviewing deposited items in mediated workflows 

A special "thank you" to the Hydra community institutions that have contributed so much to developing Hyku and the software on which it depends: Penn State University; Northwestern University; University of Michigan; University of Notre Dame; Oregon State University; Indiana University; and the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

ROADMAP REPORTS

The Latest Technical Sprint Demo by Mike Giarlo

Development on the Hydra-In-A-Box repository application continues, and here are a series of demonstrations on a variety of topics:

Watch the Hydra-in-a-Box demo playlist here.

We’ve been plugging away at UI design, feature development and community coordination. We extended our fall 2016 work cycle, and continue to work towards the alpha release, projected to finish in March 2017. 

New Faces at Hydra-In-A-Box by Hannah Frost and Carol Minton Morris

As the Hydra-in-a-Box project prepares for major developments in 2017, we added three stars to the team. Please join us in welcoming Michael Della Bitta, Heather Greer Klein, and Kelcy Shepherd. Each brings deep experience, unique skills, and genuine enthusiasm to the team and will help to ensure that our collective communities are well-informed about this exciting new repository platform and the opportunities to get involved. Read more here

Metadata Mettle by Hannah Frost and Gary Geisler

Fifth in a series of blog posts highlighting the personas produced in our design process. Here we meet Boyd Gordon, “the metadata guy” at a large independent research institution. He needs repository features that make the multitude of metadata tasks on his plate much faster and less cumbersome. When the Hydra-in-a-Box design team talks with seasoned digital content folks, metadata tooling and workflows are always a rich topic of discussion. Everyone has ideas for how to improve metadata work! Those conversations directly inform this persona and our ongoing plans for sophisticated metadata support in Hyku. Read more here

Upcoming Presentations

"Unwrapping Hydra-in-a-Box" presented by Hannah Frost at Code4Lib, Los Angeles, March 7

"Hydra-in-a-Box Project Update" presented by Heather Greer Klein at DPLAfest, Chicago, April 21

"Hyku: The Hydra in a Box" workshop with Justin Coyne and Hannah Frost, Open Repositories 2017, Brisbane, Australia, June 27

"Hyku: A Repository for All Seasons" presented by Hannah Frost and Mike Giarlo, Open Repositories 2017, Brisbane, Australia, June 28

"Many Heads, One Service: All About HykuDirect" presented by Hannah Frost and Debra Hanken Kurtz, Open Repositories 2017, Brisbane, Australia, June 28 

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