The Hydra-in-a-Box team produced the following deliverables in the course of its project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-70-15-0006-15), May 2015 - November 2017.

Hyku repository application

• Created a brand new solution bundle, Hyku, built on the latest and greatest Samvera community components
• Completed a comprehensive, user-oriented design phase, culminating in a slick, new UI design for the application
• Managed a complex and costly community process -- involving finishing the work on Sufia 7 and CurationConcerns 2, and then consolidating this work in Hyrax -- to arrive at a base component that is receiving unprecedented support and attention within the Samvera community (uniting the Sufia, CurationConcerns, Curate, Worthwhile, and Avalon Media System subcommunities)
• Delivered a Docker Compose-based multi-host configuration for spinning up Hyku and its dependencies, learning a promising new technology and giving Hyku users another option for deploying a Hyku-based service
• Features
  • Implementation of the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) Image and Presentation APIs for all deposited works
  • Mediated deposit (via flexible workflow support, allowing us to model many possible workflows across our disparate use cases)
  • Internationalization: seven languages are now supported in the UI with a framework for extending this further as needs dictate
  • Numerous additions and refinements to the new dashboard
    • Consolidated design for both administrators and registered users, getting more functionality in front of more users
    • Collapsible sidebar for increased focus on one’s tasks while using the software
    • Service status page for more transparency on what is happening in one’s repository system
    • Configurable controls for site look & feel, static content pages, and a selection of optional features, providing users greater control over how they use their sites and requiring less customization
• Improved integration between administrative set participants and groups
• Metadata enhancements including support for RightsStatements.org values and linked open entities in the Geonames controlled vocabulary for location metadata
• Implementation of ResourceSync for content synchronization by aggregation services, tested by DPLA
• New interface for a super-administrator to manage multiple tenants

Hosted service

• Market analysis & cultivation was a substantial effort during the design phase and involved gathering contacts, requirements, potential customers, and potential service providers
• Architectural needs for the hosted service were integral to the repository product development from project inception; we made an early investment in multi-tenancy and a robust Amazon Web Services (AWS) configuration
  • Expressing a multi-node configuration via AWS CloudFormation templates to manage a complex stack
  • Managing deployment of many components (including the web application stack, Apache Solr, and Apache ZooKeeper) with AWS Elastic Beanstalk in order to provide flexible auto-scaling as needs demand
  • Investing in the Fedora repository via integration with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and performance enhancements
  • Load testing and bulk import testing to harden the above configuration and ensure robustness
• Ran HykuDirect pilot, managed by DuraSpace, with six institutions
  • Several piloters are members of the DPLA community network
  • Representative of diverse cross-section of the library community: metropolitan public library, state library & archives, library consortium, liberal art college, mid-size university, state-wide digital library project

Additional work in community development, product development and testing, marketing and communications

In addition to the technical work on the cloud infrastructure and application components, we spent cycles on:

• More user interface (UI) designs to guide future work on a more holistic, more polished UI
• Developing functional requirements for future high-impact (high-cost) features, including collections management, usage analytics, and bulk metadata editing
• Repository product branding and marketing
• Running a Hyku product beta test (May 15-June 23)
  • Nearly 60 participants from nearly 35 institutions, resulting in a couple hundred new issues and several dozen fixes and improvements
• Developing extensive, openly available user documentation
• Organizing development work into transparent, open, community-oriented sprints, exposing the Samvera community to the work of this grant early and regularly and building familiarity with Hyku and Hyrax within a larger segment of the community