Issue 3, April-May 2017

Owned by Bill Branan
Feb 23, 2024
5 min read

Hydra-In-A-Box Project Update

Vol 1, Issue 3, April-May 2017

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

ANNOUNCING the Hyku Beta Release and a New Logo

The Hydra-in-a-Box team announced the availability of the Beta release of Hyku 1.0.0, the minimum viable product (MVP) in early May. The Hyku Product Beta Test is an open opportunity for the community to deploy the Hyku repository locally or in the cloud, to “kick the tires”, and to give the Hydra-in-a-Box team feedback on Hyku and its deployment options. You can read all about the Beta Test now underway on the Hyku wiki. Plans for the launch of HykuDirect hosted service pilots, along with a product beta test, are underway. 

Watch for announcements on Twitter and for updates on our blog. Please be in touch with any questions by writing to us at hyku-contact@googlegroups.com.

In addition to the software development progress (details here), the Hydra-in-a-Box team has been in the process of developing a visual brand. The name Hyku, like the repository product itself, conveys simplicity and an economy of engineering in bringing our community a high quality, easy-to-use solution that is modern, minimal and flexible. Developing a visual identity to effectively communicate those qualities was facilitated by 99designs, a company that helps organizations “find and work with talented freelance designers online.” The final logo was developed by a designer named Eunoia. We hope you like it as much as we do.


 

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:

      • Finalizing one consolidated dashboard that displays what you need to see depending on your role. Features a collapsible sidebar for improved workspace management. 

      • Enabling the administrator to easily configure site colors 

      • New dashboard widgets displaying graphs of repository statistics, including user activity, repository growth, number and status of repository objects

      • Enhanced site internationalization, adding support for Chinese language, in addition to Spanish and English

      • Enhancements to descriptive metadata fields, including: a new Location field which leverages the GeoNames web service for applying authorized forms and URIs: a new Extent field for image works

      • Alignment with Rightsstatement.org by adding a field for entering standardized rights statements, which makes it easy for content users to understand how repository works can be reused. 

      • Successful testing of our ResourceSync implementation by our DPLA partners

      • Developing an interface for the Super Administrator role, critical for management of multiple tenants by service providers 

      • Ongoing back-end work to the Amazon Web Services infrastructure to improve bulk loading operations as well as tenant creation and management

Thank you to 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; the Chemical Heritage Foundation; and UC San Diego.)

PARTNER NEWS

In the May/June issue of D-Lib Magazine Emily Gore, Michael Della Bitta and Dan Cohen, DPLA, explain how the Hydra-In-A-Box project fits into broad IMLS efforts to develop a National Digital Platform (NDP) aimed at advancing digital capacities of libraries and archives. Read the article here.

DPLA hosted a very successful community meeting in April. Michael Della Bitta and Heather Greer Klein presented a project update, announcing and demonstrating key functionality of Hyku and announcing plans for the HykuDirect service pilots. If you were unable to attend DPLA has compiled a "one-stop guide to the news, notes, media, and other materials documenting DPLAfest 2017" here.

Fedora's Product Manager, David Wilcox, produced a webinar titled, "Powering Linked Data and Hosted Solutions with Fedora" on May 15. Hyku's Product Manager, Hannah Frost, participated as one of presenters, explaining some of the ways that Hyku implements, supports, or otherwise takes advantage of linked data in the application. The webinar slides and recording are available on DuraSpace's website.

DuraSpace is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the creation of the original Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) in 2017. Read the article here.

ROADMAP REPORTS

Easy IR by Hannah Frost and Gary Geisler

Sixth and final post in a series highlighting the personas produced in our design process. Faustino Lund, a researcher and professor at a large public university, is the central character of this persona. For an institutional repository service to be useful, Faustino has a few basic criteria: it must offer an easy to use, efficient way to add and describe a variety of research files, and an easy way to see updated statistics and usage analytics so he can quickly know the reach of his work. Read more here.

The Latest Technical Sprint Demo by Mike Giarlo

This demonstration covers work done in March and April of 2017 including the consolidated dashboard with collapsible sidebar, ability to change the colors of the site via user interface controls, the review submissions page, and support for rights statements as a required metadata field. Watch the demo here: https://youtu.be/MaNU-weDiWc

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

Hyku Beta Available–How to Get Involved by Mike Giarlo and Hannah Frost

The Hydra-in-a-Box team is happy to announce the availability of the Beta release of Hyku 1.0.0, the minimum viable product towards which we have been working for the past year. Read more here.

The Value of Opportunity by Hannah Frost and Debra Hanken Kurtz

At this moment in time, the Digital Public Library of America, Stanford University Libraries, and DuraSpace wish to express again our deep gratitude to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for generously funding the Hydra-in-a-Box project. As recipients of the largest single IMLS award to date ($2M), these three diverse but mission-aligned organizations are able to create Hyku, a turnkey and open source software repository solution, now under development.  Read more here.

Upcoming Presentations

"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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