A page to capture questions we are asked about Samvera and/or repositories in general.
Charlotte's notes/responses
Karen's responses
General
- What is Samvera?
-A community and a technology stack. or solution? for managing access to digital objects.
- What is Samvera being used for?
-Digital repositories for access copies of faculty publications and cultural heritage items; platforms for scholarly communication. (Highlight public/high profile projects like DPLA, Fulcrum, Ubiquity Press?) Maybe touch on how some institutions use Hyrax for light digital asset management and workflow management?
- What is Samvera going to cost us?
-Until Hyku is a reliable, adoptable thing, we probably should be pretty up-front about the staff resources that an institution needs to build and maintain a Samvera-based repository--a designated developer at a minimum. Here at Lafayette we have a Digital Initiatives Developer and a Digital Repository Librarian who both spend a majority of their time working on the repository. That time distribution may or may not change once we get our repository up and running and our existing content migrated. I wonder if we might also mention consultation costs. Even with two designated staff members I'm not sure we could have effectively gotten going on our Samvera repo without our consultation engagement with Data Curation Experts. I agree
- How much work will it take us to implement Samvera?
-How do we want to break down this question? I have a handy "roadmap" from our consultation with DCE that details how to build a Samvera-based repository according to phases in a certain order. Do we want to get this granular? Or do we want to offer a general answer about how much designated staff time in what timeframe is necessary to get up, running, maintaining, and growing? I would say give a low range and high range and qualify. Say for a quick implementation with no customization it could take a knowledgeable Rails developer X amount of time. But depending on how complex a system you need and how much customization, it could also take months/years.
Content management
- Why don't we just put the content on a shared drive/webpage/SharePoint, etc.?
-Something about structured, facetable metadata-accessibility, discoverability, navigability? Is this a question about the very use/value/function of searchable repositories?
- What does Samvera give us that DSpace/EPrints/ContentDM/Islandora, etc. doesn't?
-Samvera operates on the most updated versions of Fedora, Apache, etc.; other solutions operate on outdated dependencies. (I don't actually know if this is technically true-it's just something I've heard! Do others know?) Samvera gives you an open solution and a community work with to improve the code.
- I've heard people talk about Hyku, Hyrax, Sufia and more. What are they? What's the difference?
-From Samvera FAQ: Hyrax is a relatively new Samvera component that combines the best parts of two previous Ruby gems, Sufia and Curation Concerns. It provides most of the “back-end” functionality that is needed to build a Samvera application. Hyku is the product release from the Hydra-in-a-Box (HyBox) project and it is built using Hyrax as its basis... Hyku is an easily installed “solution bundle” which provides a basic repository system. Hyku can be installed locally or provided as a cloud service; it can be configured for single or multi-tenant use.
- How do we measure Samvera against other (not OS) systems?
- Is there an exit strategy for me when I need to move on?
Community
- Where are you off to this time (and why)? - in relation to travelling to events/meetings
- Why are we giving things away? (with regard to community contributions of many kinds, not just code)
- How do we know it will be around in 5 or 10 years?
-Discuss the investments (time, money, and staff-time) that leading partner institutions have made? Is this also where we get into the value of open sources repo technology for the future of accessible, open-access scholarly communications?
- What do you mean when you say you are part of a community? How does that work? (with regard to trying to explain OS and Samvera and other communities we belong to as a team)
- What are the stakeholder categories of the Community (Partner/ Adopter/ etc...)
-I suppose we should get clarity from the Governance Model WG before drafting a response to this.
- What is expected of a community member? in terms of time? resources?
-Active, participatory membership in a WG?
- Difference between Open Source and a Commercial product
-I appreciated this link Chris shared way back at the founding of the Marketing WG: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/marketing-open-source-project/. Perhaps we could paraphrase a few points from this piece, especially with regard to the value of the community as the identity of the software.
Communication
- How can I connect with the Samvera community and stay up to date on developments?
-For newcomers to the community: Samvera Community Google Group and Slack #general. For Partners: Samvera Partners Google Group and Slack # partners. For Developers, Slack # dev. For attendees at Samvera Connect, Slack # connect.
Technical
- Where can I try/download Samvera?
- My institution/organisation is moving more and more stuff into the cloud. Can I have Samvera in the cloud?
- Does Samvera meet good standards of accessibility/security/...?
- How stable is the code?
- Who else is using it? and how?
Legal
- Who owns the IPR? (internal question)
Samvera code is released under an Apache 2 open source license. All contributors to the code, and their institutions, have signed a Contributor License Agreement granting Samvera the right to distribute the contributions they have made.
Samvera documentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License except where specifically noted. - Who owns the license again?