Samvera Connect 2020: Program

Owned by Richard Green
Last updated: Nov 02, 2020
17 min read

Friday 23rd and Monday 26th - Thursday 29th October, 2020

All times below are US Eastern Daylight time




Contents

Presentations Friday 23rd October

These Friday presentations would normally have taken place on the conference "plenary day" and are aimed at a general audience.

Follow this link for the full recording of the first day (approx. 3 hours 25 minutes). 

Follow the links below for the slide packs (where provided) and a link to the appropriate part of the recording.


11:00am  Welcome and housekeeping - Rosalyn Metz, Chair Samvera Steering Group - Link

11:20am  Code of Conduct - Jessica Hilt - Link

This session will go over the Samvera Community Code of Conduct. 

11:30am  Keynote Address - Torsten Reimer, Head of Research Services, British Library, UK - Link

On the verge of success – or failure? Reflections on repositories and the wider library knowledge infrastructure (and a bit about Hyku).

With the breakthrough of the open science and research information management agenda repositories appear to have succeeded. Libraries, declared dead by some in a digital information environment, see their role now increasingly as provider of services for open research. Yet not all is as well as it seems. On the one hand, many institutions struggle to properly maintain their infrastructure and provide a good user experience. On the other hand, closed commercial services dazzle users but are a risk to transparency and openness. In this presentation I want to discuss some of the wider challenges I see for knowledge infrastructure services and talk about some relevant activities I am currently involved in – including the experiences of the British Library with using the Samvera-based Hyku solution for a shared repository service.

12:10pm - 12:20pm  Break

12:20pm  Welcome to Samvera's new Community Manager - Carolyn Caizzi and Heather Greer Klein - Link

Carolyn Caizzi was Chair of the Search Committee formed to appoint Samvera's new Community Manager. Carolyn will introduce Heather, the new CM, who will tell us a little about herself and her plans in the new job.

12:30pm  The State of the Samvera Community - Rosalyn Metz, Chair Samvera Steering Group - Link

The annual roundup of all that has happened and our exciting prospects for the next few years from Rosalyn Metz, Chair of the Samvera Steering Group.

12:50pm  Work on Hyrax, an update - Juliet Hardesty, incoming Product Owner - Link

Update on recent and coming work for the Hyrax repository-building engine. 

1:10pm - 1:20pm  Break

1:20pm  Work on Valkyrie, an update - Trey Pendragon, Technical Lead - Link

Update on recent and coming work for the Valkyrie gem.

1:40pm  Work on Avalon, an update - Jon Cameron, Product Owner, Avalon Media System - Link

Update on recent and coming work for the Avalon solution bundle

2:00pm  Work on Hyku, an update - Kevin Kochanski (Chair Hyku Interest Group) - Link

Update on recent and coming work for the Hyku solution bundle

2:20pm  Close


Presentations Monday 26th - Thursday 29th October 11:00am - 2:30pm ET

Timetable

Click for readable version!


Full day recordings - links to individual presentations are to be found with their descriptions below


Individual sessions


Kevin Kochanski, Kiah Stroud, April Rieger, Jeremy Gabriel, Ruben Ramirez | Thursday 29th October 11:00am

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: developers, newcomers

What is it like to dive headlong into Samvera from the outside? Notch8 assigned three interns to work on the Bulkrax community gem in 2020. They were not only new to Samvera, they were brand new developers in training. This talk will address the success of using interns on a Samvera project, the hurdles of taking on Samvera development, and the challenge of understanding the community concepts. You'll have an opportunity to ask these incredible interns about their experiences as they do a brief demo of their work.


Anna Headley, Trey Pendragon | Tuesday 27th October 1:20pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: developers, managers (repository)

Figgy is Princeton University Library’s staff-facing repository management application. This presentation will share screenshots, user stories, and technical overviews of all the forms, magic buttons, storage integrations, drag-and-drop targets, rake tasks, and directory watchers that Figgy provides to support the different workflows our users have for ingesting content.


Abigail E Shelton, Rob Fox | Monday 26th October 12:10pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, managers (general), metadata people, UI/UX people

The University of Notre Dame has taken a modular approach to building a new digital collections platform-integrating existing applications and connecting the people that manage and use them across the library, archives, and art museum. We began with two assumptions: one size would not fit all for our campus archives, library, and museum; and community needs above all. In this presentation, team members will talk about the past two years of experimentation, development, and conversation around how to connect our community to our cultural heritage collections through multiple integrations, both human and technological. At a high-level, we’ll discuss our technical architecture that uses legacy applications like ArchivesSpace, an aging Fedora repository, and a decades-old museum database together with the IIIF framework and open-source GatsbyJS. And perhaps more importantly, we’ll outline the cross-departmental team structure that has developers talking to museum curators, library cataloguers, archivists, and everyone in between.


Karen Shaw, Adam Arling | Monday 26th October 11:00am

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: developers, managers (general), metadata people, newcomers, UI/UX people

Over the past year, NUL dev team has implemented and refined a workflow for modular development of repository applications. It starts with addressing a specific user need or problem. Using design-thinking techniques, we next generate visual solutions through rudimentary wire framing, white boarding sessions and architecture discussions. We then move to API design and mocking before starting development with two teams working independently, from the API, outwards.

This presentation will demonstrate the iterative approach in action; using a recent major batch update feature as a case study. We’ll explore how our approach allowed us to stay connected to our users and helped keep our development team in sync. Finally, we’ll reflect on what we’ve found most successful in this approach as well as stumbling blocks we encountered along the way.


James Griffin | Monday 26th October 1:20pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: developers, UI/UX people

This presentation aims to outline and discuss attempts throughout 2019 and 2020 to integrate an early pre-release of the BrowseEverything 2.0 component for supporting Google Drive file uploads into a Samvera repository. While this shall be restricted in scope for cases which were specific to the Princeton University Library and a Valkyrie-based repository Figgy, the hope is to encourage discussions regarding obstacles which were encountered and to aim to generalize the solutions which were discovered in this integration.


E Lynette Rayle | Thursday 29th October 11:30am

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: developers, managers (repository)

I will talk about the process I went through (and possibly am continuing to go through) to convert our Hyrax application’s ActiveFedora::Base object models to Valkyrie::Resource models. This will include information on the major changes that were made, descriptions of gotchas and workarounds, and a look at how close we are to being able to use any Valkyrie storage adapter. I’m hoping to include benchmark data as well to compare the various adapters.


Emily Porter, Devanshu Matlawala | Thursday 29th October 1:20pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, developers, managers (general), managers (repository), metadata people

The Emory Libraries implemented a second-generation preservation infrastructure in 2019 utilizing Hyrax 3, Fedora 4 and AWS, following a requirements gathering phase that included developing a preservation policy and a review of preservation community best practices. This presentation describes our solution design including locally-defined entities such as preservation workflows and events and FileSet expansion to support derivative files. We will also address implementation lessons learned while leveraging existing Samvera functionality and building new features to bridge gaps between existing framework components.


Tom Johnson | Tuesday 27th October 11:30am

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, developers, devops, managers (repository), sysadmins

I know what you're asking: "what are we going to do about the cloud?" If only we had some kind of animal, recently retrofitted with Wings, that could live up there natively. Fear not: Hyraxes do that.

This presentation tackles the what, why, and how of cloud native Samvera. What is the community doing and what are solution bundles supporting? Why should you be interested? Why should you contribute? How can you (yes, i'm looking at you developers, operations folks, repository managers, bosses) benefit? How can your repository make its home among the clouds?


Brendan Quinn | Monday 26th October 11:30am

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, developers, managers (general), managers (repository), metadata people, newcomers, UI/UX people

Northwestern University Libraries has been building a "green field" digital repository application since June 2019, code-named "Meadow". Our goal in building Meadow is to provide an internal tool to ingest, modify and publish digital resources to an API that drives our user-facing digital collections frontend. Meadow's development roadmap has focused on complementing NUL's existing production workflows and implementing best practices in digital preservation in a cloud-based environment. Meadow is built with a several languages, tools, and frameworks including: Elixir, Phoenix, React, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Amazon Web Services, Docker and Terraform. This presentation will focus on describing why we chose this path and the decisions and tradeoffs we've made along the way, along with a brief demonstration of our current state.


Tom Johnson, Matt Critchlow | Tuesday 27th October 12:40pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following group: developers

This talk will outline the Surfliner code base, describe the GitLab monolithic source repository, and discuss the reasons behind choosing this model of source control management. It will include background on the systems and workflows used by the UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara teams that make managing and working productively with a single repository feasible, in addition to a psychomachia-style discussion of the advantages and trade-offs of this approach.


Alisha Evans, Shana Moore | Tuesday 27th October 11:00am

Everyone is welcome at this presentation which is suited to all audience groups.

New to Samvera? Welcome! We understand how steep the learning curve may seem when getting started.

Samvera 101 is an introductory presentation that will cover fundamental principles with a sampling of common topics and definitions used within the Samvera stack and community.

Framework topics include discussions around: Rails, Sidekiq, Data Stores, Fedora, Solr, Blacklight, etc. While application level topics include discussions around: Avalon, Hyrax, Hyku, etc.

Like a prerequisite class, this talk is designed to prepare developers and community members for success! Attendees will leave having a greater understanding of Samvera's components and how they come together to create a Samvera application.


Michael B Klein, Trey Pendragon, Edward Silverton | Tuesday 27th October 12:10pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, developers, devops, managers (general), sysadmins

After trying to navigate deployment, configuration, performance, and scaling issues of several different image servers and support infrastructure (Cantaloupe, Aware, Riiif, nginx, and SquidCache, to name a few), we decided to see if we could build something less general/configurable but far more suited to our use case and runtime environment.

serverless-iiif started out as a bare bones, proof-of-concept demonstration of how a scalable, high-performance IIIF image server could be implemented in a small, inexpensive AWS Lambda function. Just over a year later, the project serves as the basis for high-volume IIIF services running in production at Northwestern University, Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, and the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. This presentation will cover the project from its beginnings (as a small demo repository carved out of Northwestern's cloud repository infrastructure), through a number of forks, merges, performance enhancements, deployment improvements, and into production. We will also include performance benchmarks, current production stats, and some thoughts on future work.


Esmé Cowles, Kim Leaman | Monday 26th October 12:40pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, managers (repository), metadata people

Princeton University Library’s digital projects and initiatives were seriously disrupted by COVID-19. Digitization of materials for projects and forthcoming exhibitions came to an unexpected halt at the same time as patrons and staff were separated from physical objects and library spaces. Necessity, however, provided an opportunity to reassess digital projects and how staff members interact with and contribute to our repository (Figgy). We focused on the creation of workflows and documentation for new contributors who would be working in the repository, helping them enhance existing digital objects with OCR, item level organization, structural metadata, page labeling, and IIIF display attributes.

We describe how we were able to use Figgy and unexpectedly-available staff time to make more effective research tools and provide a better user experience for patrons and staff working with our digital collections. Such enhancements add immense value to our collections as well as to our applications, and the work can be done effectively by a wide range of staff from different departments with variable skill sets.


Gretchen Gueguen, Amanda Hurford | Wednesday 28th October 12:10pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, developers,  managers (general), managers (repository), metadata people, newcomers, UI/UX people

Collaboration is more than just sharing costs, and the PALCI and PALNI consortia are pushing that idea into our repository management. We want to create the flexibility for both IR workflows and more “traditional” library-owned content within the same instance of Hyku. We also want to enable libraries to collaborate and share work, not just with their consortial partners, but also among their own departments across campus. To us, this means enhancing the ability to manage user and tenant settings to enable different workflows.

By working with a number of libraries testing out the Hyku multi-tenant option, we realized that a robust dashboard for user/role assignment and the expansion of a few more roles would enable us to manage these flexible workflow options. PALNI and PALCI are working with Notch 8 to enhance the underlying “role” and “group” functionality in Hyku and develop a new administrative dashboard to control permissions across multiple tenants. We will also be expanding role and group functions within tenant management.

This presentation will discuss how we researched and developed our requirements as well as the plan and progress to date.


Richard Jones, Neil Jefferies | Thursday 29th October 12:40pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: developers, devops, managers (repository), metadata people, sysadmins

Between 2018 and 2019, Jisc funded an effort to refresh the SWORD repository deposit protocol, with modern repository use cases in mind, especially around data repositories. As a result we produced a draft specification, extensively reviewed by a large number of the repositories community, including those from the Samvera and Fedora communities. In 2019, NII provided funding to produce a reference implementation, and we have been working to prove that the specification is implementable and viable. That work concluded in July 2020 with the release of a client library and a server library in Python. Now the SWORDv3 team is looking outward to the rest of the repositories community, looking to engage them in development for their platforms, and to enable novel integrations.

This presentation will introduce the spec for those that are not familiar, and describe the technical and community-building work that is ongoing, and call for engagement by the Samvera technical community in working with SWORDv3.

https://swordapp.github.io/swordv3/swordv3.html


Francesco De Virgilio, Chris Colvard | Thursday 29th October 12:10pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: developers, devops, sysadmins

Ubiquity repositories, which are based on Hyku, are designed to be highly scalable, highly reliable and quick to deploy in the cloud. In this presentation we will outline the technical architecture we have implemented, along with the challenges faced. These include scalability, security, cost-efficiency, performance, reliability, resilience, portability, delivery pipelines for code deployment, error reporting, testing and localization. We will also discuss our approach ensuring we remain on the most recent stable branch of the platform and contributing our code back to the community.


Kate Lynch, Lynette Rayle, Chris Colvard, Collin Brittle, Alexandra Dunn, Jeremy Friesen | Wednesday 28th October 1:20pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, developers, devops, managers (general), newcomers, sysadmins

The Samvera Branch Renaming Working Group formed in August 2020 to create a recommendation, plan, and timeline for our community to stop using long-practiced "master/slave" coding jargon that perpetuates racist systems and language, and instead embrace and implement positive change, leading by example. This presentation will detail the work of this group; the guiding morals and philosophy for undertaking this work, where and why we prioritized change while some communities are left uncertain how to proceed with similar work, the challenges we have discovered along the way, our immediate future plans, and the forward-to-better model that we hope this group’s deliverables put forth for the Samvera Community and others in the Open Source world.


Mikala Narlock, Dan Brower | Wednesday 28th October 12:40pm

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following group: managers (repository)

Our Samvera-based institutional repository is nearing eight years old, and one can safely say it is middle aged-- and with middle age comes a mid-life crisis. Over the course of the past year, the current product owners have examined the role and vision of the repository and embraced the role of maintainers, advocating for critical external needs. Balancing the technical needs and costs of an aging system while providing new services to meet user needs with a limited technical staff has required being realistic about both available resources and institutional priorities. In this talk, we will discuss our experiences, our methods for refining the focus of a large project, focusing developer work to yield maximum payoffs, and centering the repository to be more useful to the campus community by meeting users where they are.


Kevin Kochanski, Amanda Hurford, Brian Hole, Gretchen Gueguen, Sara Gould | Wednesday 28th October 11:00am

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, managers (general), managers (repository), metadata people, newcomers

Key voices from the Hyku community, including the British Library, Notch8, PALCI, PALNI, and Ubiquity Press, will discuss their perspective on what makes Hyku the solution for various use cases. This will not be a list of project updates, but instead be a dialogue about what makes Hyku a versatile platform and why it was chosen for our projects. Hyku users and potential adopters will benefit from the opportunity to ask questions and come away with a greater understanding of this continually evolving repository platform.


Ilkay Holt, Ellen Ramsey, Brian Hole | Wednesday 28th October 11:30am

Everyone is welcome at this presentation but it may be particularly suited to those in the following groups: administrators, developers, managers (general), managers (repository), metadata people, UI/UX people

Advancing Hyku Project aims to support the growth of open access through institutional repositories by introducing significant structural improvements and new features to the Samvera Community’s Hyku Institutional Repository. Features include full metrics and altmetrics, ORCiD profile sync, auto-population, in-browser viewing and annotation, and pathways to long-term preservation. The project partners are University of Virginia Library, Ubiquity Press and the British Library, with funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of philanthropists Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The project began October 2019 and is scheduled to conclude by August 2021.

This presentation will provide an update on the project which is coming to an end of its first year. Presenters will introduce the developments made so far, architectural review for structural improvements for the Hyku framework, collaborations to strengthen the project deliverables and the forthcoming plans for the coming year. The session also aims to receive feedback from the audience on the set of priorities within the project. This will kick off a wider community input opportunity following the event to leverage the outcome of the project. See https://advancinghyku.io/

Lightning talks

Lightning talks are seven minutes long.  The links below give you access to the slide deck and video recording for each talk.

Tuesday 27th October 1:50pm

Hands-on With New Avalon Media System Developments | Jon Cameron - Link
A quick demo of the latest features and changes in Avalon Media System, showcasing developments across the application: UI, Structural Metadata Editor, Encode Settings and more.

Metadata Mess: Managing Errors in Vendor-Supplied Metadata | Rebekah Kati, Anna Goslen - Link
In May 2018, UNC Libraries purchased a report from 1Science which listed 47,000 articles authored by UNC researchers. Although the vendor characterized the report as an out-of-the-box tool designed to fill an institutional repository, we found that it would take significant work to make it usable for UNC’s Hyrax-based institutional repository, the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR). In this presentation, we will discuss the issues that we identified, including scripting errors, inconsistent metadata and rights concerns. We will describe the plans and processes to fix these issues and to adapt the metadata for our repository. Additionally, we will address best practices for uploads and future plans.

Introducing the Controlled Vocabularies Decision Tree | Juliet Hardesty - Link
The Controlled Vocabulary (CV) Decision Tree is meant to provide guidance for selecting and using controlled vocabularies behind descriptive metadata fields. This guidance is useful within Hyrax and other software incorporating metadata fields that could benefit from controlled terms for consistency and accuracy. We will share the decision tree for selecting and modifying controlled vocabularies and the accompanying list of controlled vocabularies that we hope to collaboratively grow.

Staying Informed by Questioning COVID Authority | E Lynette Rayle - Link
How I used the Samvera Questioning Authority gem to create an app that shows graphs of our surrounding county COVID data?

Fedora 6.0: Impacts and Opportunities for the Samvera Community | David Wilcox - Link

The Fedora community has been making steady progress on Fedora 6.0, with a beta release anticipated in 2020 and a full release in early 2021. This new version of Fedora introduces a number of benefits and improvements that will be of interest to the Samvera community, including enhanced digital preservation capabilities via the Oxford Common File Layout and performance improvements that address specific issues identified by community members. This lightning talk will provide a brief overview of the Fedora 6.0 features and improvements that will be of most interest to the Samvera community, along with an update on development progress to date.


Wednesday 28th October 1:50pm

Ye Olde Tech Call | Jeremy Friesen - Link
A quick introduction to the Samvera Tech call to address what is it, who is it for, and how can I engage.

"Authoritex": Authority Alchemy in Elixir | Karen Shaw - Link
Heavily inspired by QA, "Authoritex" is a Hex package for querying any controlled vocabulary or set of authority terms that NUL developed for use within our Elixir ecosystem. We'll go through quick overview of Authoritex and how it fits into our repository ingest application "Meadow" and our broader strategy for handling controlled terms and authorities.

Work on Bulkrax, an update | Kiah Stroud - Link
Update on recent and coming work for the Bulkrax gem.

DOIng more with Hyrax | Chris Colvard - Link

Hyrax-doi is a new Hyrax plugin that provides tooling for working with DOIs including model attributes, minting, and fetching descriptive metadata. This presentation will give a quick tour of the features and how to use it in hopes of sparking conversation about how to improve it and its integration with Hyrax. This is part of the Advancing Hyku project's work on extracting and contributing back features from Ubiquity Press' Repositories platform originally developed for the British Library.


Working Group and Interest Group updates

WG/IG updates are five minutes long.

Link

Monday 26th October 1:50pm

  • Marketing Working Group | Chris Awre
  • UX Interest Group | Adam Arling
  • Metadata Interest Group | Anna Goslen
  • Controlled Vocabulary Decision Tree Working Group | Juliet Hardesty
  • Hyrax 3.0 Metadata Application Profile Documentation Working Group | Nora Egloff
  • Repository Managers' Interest Group | Moira Downey




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