Samvera Community Wiki
A Vision for Hyrax
Our common needs and experiences over the past few years have moved the Samvera Community in the direction of, for a great many of us, convergence on using Hyrax as a platform for our repository work. It is not possible or sustainable for Hyrax to be all things to all parties; the goal of Hyrax is to be an opinionated — though configurable — base for both institutional & data repositories and digital collections management repositories. Thus, we plan to continue building Hyrax in a way that allows it to be used off-the-shelf and as a springboard for highly customized solutions.
While improving daily, the current implementation of Hyrax is more suited to institutional & data repository use cases than it is to digital collections management repository use cases. Expected functionality for managing digital collections such as bulk ingest, edit, and export; database performance; and flexibility around collections and collection types are all noticeably missing from Hyrax. In order to realize the vision of Hyrax serving as a base for both sets of use cases, we propose focusing the upcoming release series on functionality for digital collections repositories while bolstering functionality for institutional & data repositories. (Most of the prioritized functionality will, we believe, be useful in both use cases.)
Development of new features is not our only goal for Hyrax. Feedback from the community is clear that there is a need to shift some of our focus to building more sustainable community practices around code maintenance, documentation, testing, and communication. While not entirely specific to Hyrax, we include suggested improvements in these areas as they will impact Hyrax development and the broader Samvera Community. As we progress in these areas, we will better articulate the resource needs and processes for the continued development of our shared software.
Targeted within the Next Year (from today)
Listed roughly in priority order and the expected order of implementation. Some efforts may be implemented at the same time. The priority order may shift based on available resources and community interest.
In progress - [project board|https://github.com/samvera/hyrax/projects]
Bugfixes & Ongoing Maintenance Work
The Hyrax Maintenance Working Group is charged with supporting core maintenance and development for Hyrax in order to provide a stable base of support for the solution bundle. This working group is not meant to be a replacement for community-led development efforts and/or contributions, but rather, it is meant to augment such efforts. This group may work on some Roadmap Items. When they do, the group will be identified in the Status Summary section of the item.
Status Summary/Major Activities:
July-December 2021 Cycle - Focus on issue clean-up, documentation, and testing Valkyrie work
moving forward without Tech Lead, preparing for pledge-driven maintenance work in 2022
January-June 2021 Cycle - Focus on issue clean-up in general
2018-08-13 Focus sprint focused on Accessibility roadmap item
Partial work completed - [milestone|https://github.com/samvera/hyrax/milestone/9]
Hyrax-Valkyrie
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) repository solution which enables the use of multiple disparate storage backends for both files and metadata using the Data Mapper pattern.
Status Summary/Major Activities:
Conversations at Samvera Connect 2018
In-person sprint at Penn State - January 2019
Upcoming Development Effort - https://github.com/samvera/hyrax/projects/14
In Progress - [milestone|https://github.com/samvera/hyrax/milestone/14]
Batch RoundTripping of Data (import, export, edit)
2021-01-12 - This is almost done and could be considered for inclusion in Hyrax or as an add-on/gem option. Might have feature flipper that doesn't install gem unless it is configured. Might also have this installed but not turned on without a configuration setting.
Allow bulk ingest and export of content and/or metadata from Hyrax using both command line and user interfaces.
Status Summary/Major Activities:
Coordination of focus and scope with representatives from Batch WG, Avalon, Hyrax, and Hyku (completed Late 2018)
Oregon Digital is creating an RFP to fund the development of this feature set
Partial work completed
Group and responsibility management
2021-01-12 - Being worked on in Hyku
Re-architect groups and responsibilities to improve clarity of function.
Status Summary/Major Activities:
Permissioning Analysis Working Group:
2018-07-16 Request for feedback on deliverables of working group focused on use cases.
2018-09-21 Webinar
Hyrax Bridge Development Effort - the goal of this effort is to implement some new permission features for Hyrax in the near term, while the Permissioning Analysis Working Group completes it's pilot phase.
Proposed or Future (more than a year out)
Enhancement Requests (in Issues)
Proposed
Replace Actor Stack with DRY Transactions
Use DRY Transactions instead of the actor stack to make process clearer and easier to back out when things go wrong.
Status Summary/Major Activities:
TBA
Comments
That makes sense. I'll look at doing that once I get feedback from others too. Thanks for the review.
Dig it! Thanks, @Lynette Rayle!
@Lynette Raylei think this is a great approach. Thanks for putting it together. Can we get a few folks from SIGAHR to flesh this out and officially get it on the SIGAHR wiki (instead of, or in addition to, the google doc version of the roadmap)?
Format looks good, I suggest that it might be better to have old/released items on a separate history page that this one just links to