SC18 - Workshops at Samvera Connect

Owned by Brian McBride
Last updated: Oct 21, 2018 by Richard Green
7 min read

Registration for Workshops is now Open - Register Here! 


Jump to: Morning Sessions  - Afternoon Sessions

Workshops will be held on Tuesday October 9, 2018. Information below is subject to change. 

Workshop registration is now part of Samvera Connect conference registration. (link to registration when open)


All Day Session (9AM-12PM; 2:00 PM-5:00PM)

1) Scaling Data: TACO from Design to Deploy (All Day)

Description: A growing number of people are seeing the need to evolve digital repository systems to a data-forward architecture that can scale to millions of records. But, how to get there? At Stanford, we’re working on TACO, an AWS-based system that separates data concerns from management systems. This system is the backbone of our future digital repository. This workshop gives an overview of a data API & service example based on TACO, going from design to data modeling & validation to development to deployment. It’s not meant to be an in-depth dive of every topic therein, but link these domains and topics together. We hope that participants would then leave with more comfort on how to start separating out services and data needs for an evolution to clear RESTful APIs and scalable architecture, as well as having spent some time getting to know TACO.

Presenter(s): Aaron Collier justin cmharlow

Audience:  Library data system designers; Digital Library architects; Data & Services Developers; DevOps Engineers

Equipment: Laptop with stable internet connection; AWS Free Account (information sent out before the workshop); Latest Docker install locally; Go installed locally.

Experience: Some scripting experience; Some experience with containerization.

Room: 1120

Morning Sessions (9AM-12PM)

1) Rails Testing Featuring RailsBridge

Description: Increase the stability of your Rails app by learning about tests: what they are, why they're used, and how to use them! Goals (from RailsBridge):

  • what tests are
  • why they're used
  • how they're used
  • what types of tests exist
  • what types of frameworks exist
  • some additional concepts in testing such as doubles, stubs, spies, and Webmock
  • how to write tests
  • how to break tests
  • how to fix tests

Presenter(s): cam156

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Personal Laptop (with development environment)

Room:  1009

2) Managing Samvera-based Projects and Services

Description: This hands-on workshop will cover tools and techniques to help managers keeping in sync with community development efforts while managing the user expectations and needs. We will cover the dynamics of dedicating responsibilities at the institution and the community level.

Presenter(s): Nabeela Jaffer Hannah Frost Steve Van Tuyl

Audience: Managers, Repository Managers

Equipment: Laptop will be helpful, but not required

Slides: http://bit.ly/managers-SC2018

Room:  1110

3) Enhanced media playback in a Hyrax app using Avalon components

Description: The Avalon Media System is a Samvera-based system for managing and providing access to large collections of digital audio and video. Through version 6, Avalon was known as an independent Samvera solution bundle. In Hyrax-based Avalon 7, the previous monolithic codebase has been broken down into components available for use outside of the solution bundle. These components enhance media playback in Hyrax through robust derivative generation, streaming server support, adaptive bitrate streaming, a IIIF Presentation 3.0 consuming player, and a scriptable embedded player. This workshop will include:

  • An overview of the Avalon solution bundle and the new Avalon components
  • Hands-on activities adding the components to a Hyrax application and using them to ingest and play time-based media

Presenter(s): Chris Colvard (Deactivated)  & Brian Keese

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Development environment (Hyrax 2.1)

Room:  1008

4) Dive into Hyrax for new developers (Canceled)

Description: TBD

Presenter(s): Mark Bussey

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Personal Laptop (development environment instructions)

Room:  1170

5) Hop, Skip, & a Jump: Sufia to Hyrax (Canceled)

Description: Currently on Sufia and interested in getting on the Hyrax bus? In this workshop, we will take a Sufia app that has some basic customizations and data and walk through some options for getting it successfully to Hyrax 2.1.

Presenter(s): Kevin Musiorski

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Personal Laptop (development environment instructions will be provided)

Room: 1140

6) Introduction to Valkyrie

Description: Valkyrie is a new persistence layer for Samvera, supporting multiple backends for storing files and metadata. Currently supported backends include Fedora, PostgreSQL and Solr for metadata, and Fedora and local disk for files. Valkyrie provides an abstraction layer over file and metadata persistence, allowing an application to be configured to use different backends without code changes. This workshop will include:

  • An overview of Valkyrie's design, including why the Data Mapper pattern was used, and how Valkyrie addresses sustainability issues with ActiveFedora
  • Status updates on current Valkyrie development, including applications built using Valkyrie, and efforts to use Valkyrie in Hyrax
  • Hands-on exercises to give attendees first-hand experience working with Valkyrie and demonstrate how concepts from Samvera applications work with Valkyrie

Presenter(s): Adam Wead Esmé Cowles

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Ruby/Rails development environment

Room:  1160

7) Keeping your Samvera application up to date (NOTE: Changed to morning)

Description: This workshop will discuss upgrade strategies, workflows, best practices and common pitfalls. Some familiarity with either Rails or Samvera applications is recommended. We'll go in depth on how we evaluate an application for upgrade, different strategies we recommend and when to use them, and walk through a couple scenarios in depth.

Presenter(s): Rob Kaufman & George Wheeler

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Personal Laptop (development environment instructions)

Room:  1735


Afternoon Sessions (2PM-5PM)

1) Architecting repository infrastructure with Collection Types, Admin Sets, and Collections

Description: Have you ever wondered when to use admin sets vs collections, what this new collection type is all about, or how many work types you should have? This workshop will focus on designing approaches for best practices on using admin sets and collections in structuring a repository in Hyrax. We will talk about the basic building blocks available in Hyrax from collecting items to controlling visibility to work types and files. Consideration will be given to various uses cases, from single-use case systems to complex multi-use case systems. There will be time for hands on design in groups of use cases brought by participants. (syllabus)

Presenter(s): Lynette Rayle jrudder

Audience: Managers, Repository Managers, Software Architects

Equipment: Laptops will be helpful, but not required (will access google docs)

Room:  1110

2) Introduction to Fedora 5.0 and Alternate Implementations

Description: Fedora is the flexible, extensible, open source repository platform that stores, preserves and serves linked data resources, and is used as the underlying platform by Samvera for managing content. The next major release of Fedora represents the publication and implementation of the API specification. This specification aligns Fedora with a set of modern web standards, and provides an opportunity for emerging implementations of the specification to service evolving use cases. This workshop will provide an overview of the API specification, including information on the updates clients will need to make in response to API changes. It will also introduce some of the other API implementations that have been developed by the Fedora community.

Presenter(s): David Wilcox

Audience: Repository Managers and Developers

Equipment:  Personal Laptop (Fedora virtual machine will be provided by instructor in advance)

Room:  1735

3) Introduction to Samvera

Description:

  • What is Samvera?
  • Community structure and resources
  • Hands-on: examples and exploration
  • Technical overview and resourcing
  • Getting started with Samvera
  • How to pitch Samvera back home: Benefits
  • Q&A

If you are new to Samvera or considering adoption of Samvera products, this workshop is designed for you! Samvera is a community, a set of tools, and increasingly a collection of ready-to run applications to help build a digital repository for your institution. It is an open source and sustainable community. This workshop will provide an on-boarding and general entrée to the Samvera community for non coders. The workshop will begin with an overview of Samvera community and products– what is it, why is it different. It will showcase some applications that exist, and discuss the how the community at large works. The overview will be followed by a general technical overview designed for non-coders. The staff skills needed to maintain and contribute a Samvera solution will be discussed, resources that exist to get started, and how to contribute code to the community. The workshop will conclude with discussing how to pitch Samvera and get institutional support. It will discuss the advantages of being part of the community and how that strengthens the sustainability of the tools, the applications, and the community overall. 

Presenter(s): Robin Lindley Ruggaber Steve Van Tuyl  Julie Allinson 

Audience: Anyone new or newish to Samvera – Managers, General

Equipment: N/A

Room:  1008

4) Samvera as an API

Description: This workshop will discuss tools and capacities for building external interfaces (React apps, mobile apps) that use Samvera as an API and data source.  We recommend some familiarity with developing Samvera or Rails applications as a pre-req to this workshop. We'll go over API design, look at authentication gotchas and walk away with a solid understanding of what it would take to build external tools that connect to your Samvera instance.

Presenter: Rob Kaufman  & George Wheeler

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Personal Laptop (development environment instructions)

Room:  1009

5) Testing your Samvera Application - hands-on workshop

Description: This workshop builds on basic RSpec testing skills to help developers build robust test suites for Samvera applications. What should you test? How can you DRY up your test suite to streamline test development and maintenance? Developers will leave with an expanded sense of advanced testing tools and how to effectively use them in Samvera development.

Presenter(s): tamsin woo

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Personal Laptop (development environment instructions)

Room:  1170

6) Static Websites and Community Documentation with Jekyll

Description: This half-day workshop will orient participants with the Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) static website generator. Jekyll is an open source command-line tool for transforming plain text into modern websites. Samvera uses Jekyll to develop and maintain our community documentation, samvera.github.io, but Jekyll can be used for several digital library projects, including scholarly publications and digital exhibits. We will provide a basic overview of the Jekyll development environment, introduce participants to helpful resources for customizing Jekyll websites, and cover our GitHub-based workflow for editing and maintaining samvera.github.io. Basic HTML, Markdown, and command-line experience is helpful but not required. Beginners are welcome!  

Presenter(s): Chris Diaz  & Andrew Myers

Audience: Developers, Managers, and Repository Managers (Everyone)

Equipment: Personal Laptop and Jekyll (installation instructions)

Room: 1140

7) Hands-on with the Bridge2Hyku Toolkit  (NOTE: Changed to afternoon)

Description: 

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries, in partnership and consultation with numerous institutions, was awarded an IMLS National Leadership/Project Grant (LG-70-17-0217-17) to support the creation of the Bridge2Hyku (B2H) Toolkit. As part of this toolkit, University of Houston is developing several applications to assist in the migration of data from CONTENTdm to Hyku. The workshop will cover two important tools:

CDM Bridge: a stand alone electron-based tool that easily pulls metadata and files out of any CONTENTdm instance for migration and metadata remediation.

HyBridge: a importer gem that would allow Hyku providers an easy insert into their stack for users to migrate with.

This workshop will have attendees work with these applications and the B2H Toolkit to cover the basics in metadata migration. Learn how to use CDM Bridge to get your data out of CONTENTdm, allowing you to assess, reconcile and prepare your data for Hyku. See how using HyBridge can ingest your data into Hyku and learn how to evaluate that data in its new home.

Presenter(s): tcrocken Sean Watkins

Audience: Developers

Equipment: Personal Laptop (development environment instructions will be provided)

Room: 1160