06/14/19

Owned by James Griffin
Last updated: Jun 27, 2019
4 min read

Attending

Time: 08:00AM PDT/11:00AM EDT - 09:00AM PDT/12:00PM EDT

Zoom: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/7739591625


Attendees


Agenda


Notes

  • Introductions
    • Most in attendance are involved in the GeoBlacklight community
    • Many are not running Samvera currently, but remain interested in the potential for GeoBlacklight and Samvera repository integration
  • Discussing Samvera
    • Samvera is primarily a community formed with the objective of sharing common tools for developing digital repositories using Ruby on Rails
    • Samvera was originally branded as Hydra, but due to copyright issues encountered in the EU, this was rebranded as Samvera in April of 2017
    • In terms of software, Samvera was oriented towards collaborating upon open source software libraries in Ruby (Gems) in order to implement a custom Rails digital repository
    • However, as the Samvera community evolved and grew, a number of institutions (such as the Penn State University) had developed repositories which, being open source, started to establish standard practices
    • Further, the Samvera community began to attract institutions and organizations which were interested in the repositories which members had developed, but were not resourced with the staff required to implement their own custom repositories
    • By 2017, community leaders (members of Samvera Steering) began to actively work to develop “solution bundles” - entire repository applications which could be branded and configured with more minimal effort
    • Two of the most popular bundles are Hyrax and the Avalon Media System
  • Samvera and Hyrax
    • Hyrax was developed in response to the need for a community solution which addresses the common uses for preserving cultural heritage materials or institutional repositories
    • The project itself is currently released on version 2.5.1, and community developers are quickly working towards a stable 3.0.0 release
    • While Hyrax provides a fairly mature digital repository application, it does still require a Rails developer for customizing the theme of this, as well as the resources to deploy and maintain the application
    • https://hyrax.samvera.org/
  • Hydra-in-a-Box and Hyku
    • By November 2017, resources were provided to the Digital Public Library of America, Stanford University, and DuraSpace by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in order to provide a means by which to offer Hyrax applications in the cloud, without the need for any developers to customize them
    • Hydra-in-a-Box was provided as the project name, but this essentially encompassed the already existing Hyrax, as well as a related project, Hyku.  Where Hyrax was the repository application, Hyku offered the configuration templates which allowed community members to deploy Hyrax repositories to cloud server infrastructure (e. g. Amazon Web Services).  Further, Hyku offers the ability to launch many Hyraxes in the cloud; hence, multiple institutions could share a single Hyku cloud solution to deploy a Hyrax for each institution (this is referred to as multi-tenancy)
    • http://hydrainabox.samvera.org/
  • Institutions interested Samvera
    • Invenio users https://invenio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
    • BePress Users
      • The acquisition of BePress by Elsevier has led some to consider Samvera
    • Many are interested in migrating away from Invenio or BePress and towards open source community solution
  • History of this Interest Group
    • Formed in 2015 with many Samvera participants
      • Chaired by Darren Hardy (formerly headed GIS software development for Stanford Libraries)
      • Aimed towards exploring community solutions for supporting the management of geospatial content and metadata in Samvera repositories
      • Led to the formation of two Working Groups
        • GIS Data Modeling Working Group
        • Geopredicates Working Group
  • GIS Data Modeling Working Group
    •  Samvera GIS Data Modeling Working Group
    • Led to the development of a solution for Hyrax 1.x geospatial content support
    • Included support for scanned maps, GIS raster, and vector data sets
    • Also includes a metadata application profile for handling basic geospatial metadata (e. g. bounding box coordinates)
    • With the first releases of GeoWorks, this working group was considered to have successfully concluded
    • Unfortunately, the maintainers have moved on from this, and it is no longer compatible with Hyrax 2.x releases
    • Princeton has repurposed much of this work for supporting geospatial content management in a custom, Samvera repository
    • It would be ideal if there would be some who might wish to participate in reviving efforts to maintain and upgrade GeoWorks
    • Perhaps another alternative would be to see through the community-sourced development of a new GeoWorks which no longer requires Hyrax as a dependency
  • Geopredicates Working Group
    • Samvera Geo Predicates Working Group 
    • This working group was developed in order to determine and document the best practices surrounding linked geospatial data
    • Linked data itself is a much broader topic, and some preliminary discussion of the topic can be found at http://rubenverborgh.github.io/WebFundamentals/semantic-web/
    • Publishing data sets to the World Wide Web in compliance with linked data specification standards has been an ongoing struggle for many organizations
    • Currently, there are efforts from within the World Wide Web Consortium to more rigorously define standards and practices around these (please see )
    • This Working Group aims to derive a set of best practices for publishing Samvera repository resource metadata to the WWW using similar standards
  • Goals for this Interest Group
    • Would really like to see an integration between GeoBlacklight and Samvera
    • If there could be an effort to maintain a dialogue between these two communities, that might be valuable to those interested in both
    • There are many who would like to see GeoBlacklight integration with Samvera repositories (ideally, Hyrax, or some other solution bundle) supported for those interested in digital repository applications
    • However, there will need to be further discussions in order to determine what can be done to facilitate these efforts from within the community
  • Action Items
    • Look to contact other members of the Samvera Community and invite them to the next call
    • Schedule a demonstration of Princeton’s digital repository support for geospatial content (along with synchronization for GeoBlacklight)
    • Contact Stanford for questions regarding their support for geospatial content within the Stanford Digital Repository