Issue 4, July-August 2017

Owned by Carol Minton Morris
Last updated: Feb 23, 2024 by Heather Greer Klein
4 min read

Hydra-In-A-Box Project Update

Vol 1, Issue 4, July-August 2017

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

HykuDirect Pilot Update

The HykuDirect Pilot program is underway with members testing the fully-hosted service version of Hyku repository software which handles server and storage provisioning, Hyku repository software installation, deployment, upgrades, and scaling. The second pilot cohort begins this week with participants from the University of Miami, PALCI, New Hampshire Digital Project. "Piloters" have been active in identifying issues which have guided technical development. 

Eric Williams-Bergen, Director of Digital Initiatives, St. Lawrence University Libraries and member of the first HykuDirect Pilot cohort explained his institution’s interest in participating:

"As a small liberal arts college, we are excited to join the HykuDirect pilot and to manage our digital assets using a robust and technologically advanced open-source platform. We are also eager to explore the opportunities HykuDirect pilot presents for us to share knowledge and experiences with other partnering institutions.”

We are grateful to all of the institutions who have volunteered. Far more institutions were interested than we could accommodate for a limited term pilot. The following six institutions representing many different institution sizes and use cases were selected, and asked to contribute $1,000 each to help cover the cost of the pilot.

These institutions are providing valuable feedback to the hosted service team to help ensure a robust and competitive service will be available to all institutions beginning in the fall of 2017. Pricing and subscriptions for the new service will be available in late summer.

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

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 helps 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, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, 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; and 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 Samvera 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

•  After four years with DPLA, founding executive director Dan Cohen has moved on to a new opportunity as Vice Provost for Information Collaboration and Dean of Libraries at Northeastern University. Michele Kimpton, DPLA's Business Development Director and Senior Strategist, is serving as interim executive director, bringing significant experience from her work as Chief Strategist for LYRASIS and CEO of DuraSpace. The DPLA board is moving forward with the search for a new executive director. Read more here.

• The Samvera team recently announced a new name, log and website for Samvera, formerly known as "Hydra". Read more here.

• DuraSpace and Data Curation Experts are set to offer the Fedora and Samvera Camp at Oxford University, Sept 4 - 8, 2017. The camp will be hosted by Oxford University Oxford, UK and is supported by Jisc. The organizers are pleased to announce that the early bird discount registration price has been extended until July 24. Read more here.

• DuraSpace, the Fedora API Specification Editors, and the Fedora Leadership Group have announced that the initial public working draft of the Fedora API Specification is available for broader public review. Read more here.

• Get ready for Open Repositories 2018 in Bozeman, Montana, June 4-7. Read more here.

ROADMAP REPORTS

Expanded Language Support in Hyku by Hannah Frost and Mike Giarlo

With English as the starting point, we added Spanish, and soon thereafter Chinese, with the generous contributions of translations provided by native speakers in the Samvera community. Then we got a tip about i18n-tasks. This Ruby gem identifies any missing terms from languages specified in an application’s locale configuration file and then fills in the gaps with values obtained from Google Translate. This simple process makes it amazingly easy to add support for multiple languages. With this enhancement to Hyku, it is now possible to also read the UI in German, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Read more here.

The Latest Technical Sprint Demo by Mike Giarlo

This demo covers work done in May and June of 2017 — including support for translating the UI into four more languages, an interface for superadministrators to manage tenants, better integration between Admin Set participants and groups, and the ability to edit pages via the browser — and is now available: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8EE-Pfjws

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

ResourceSync for Harvesting Content from Hyku to DPLA by Hannah Frost, Mike Giarlo, Mark Matienzo, and Scott Williams

ResourceSync is a self-describing set of capabilities designed to keep content in sync between a provider and consumer of that content. The capabilities of a ResourceSync endpoint can be adapted to meet specific community requirements as it extends the Sitemaps protocol used by Google and other search engines. Read more here.


RECENT PRESENTATIONS

Hyku, A Repository for All Seasons, Hannah Frost, Mike Giarlo, OR2017  A complete project update on the hydra-in-a-box repository. Slides

HykuDirect, Service Infrastructure and Business Model, Debra Hanken Kurtz, OR2017  An overview of a Hyku hosted service offering a cloud-based version of the application

for use across multiple domains. Slides


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