The team that founded the Hydra Project met several times in the fall of 2008 at the University of Virginia. At their meeting in December of that year the name 'Hydra' was coined. Later that same day, a hydra toy was spotted, and subsequently purchased, in a local shop - this became part of the first design used on the project's documents and presentations.
Following a number of successful trademark applications, "TM" was added to the basic Samvera logo. The Samvera logo is a registered trade mark in the USA and is the subject of trademark applications in Canada, the UK and the EU.
Understand what Samvera is and how to participate Understand how to use Samvera Understand the value of Samvera Samvera is a community, a set of tools, and a collection of ready-to run and hosted applications to help build a digital repository for your institution. The community drives the specification and development of sustainable open source technology and honing best practices for managing digital content. This workshop will provide an on-boarding and general entrée to the Samvera community and solutions for non-coders. The first part will provide an overview of Samvera solutions, hosting options and the community – what is it, why is it different? It will showcase applications solving a diverse set of needs and organizations, and discuss the how the community at large works to enable these. The second part will give a general technical overview designed for a non-technical audience. The resources needed to maintain and contribute to a hosted or custom Samvera solution will be discussed, resources that exist to get started will be highlighted plus how to contribute to the community technically and non-technically. The final part will discuss value and 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. and Slides from a workshop given at Samvera Connect 2019 and described thus
This session will be a brief introduction to the Hydra community, and a 35,000ft view of Hydra technically. It is an opportunity for people new to Hydra to get some context around what we are about and, hence, the rest of the conference! and An introductory presentation at Hydra Connect 2016, described thus
A presentation given at Hydra Connect #2 described thus and Some have the impression that running a Hydra system requires a significant team of developers. In fact, there are a number of institutions running Hydra that are "one-developer shops". This talk will explore the pros and cons.
A combined slide deck of the short reports from Interest and Working Groups at Hydra Connect 2015. Archivists Interest Group Digital Preservation Interest Group Geospatial Interest Group Hydra GIS Data Modeling Working Group Metadata Working Group Page Turner Interest/Working Group Service Management Interest Group User Experience Interest Group Web Presence Interest Group
A poster describing a possible workflow for using the open source software Archivematica to provide preservation functionality alongside the University of Hull's Hydra repository. Prepared for Hydra Connect 2015 in Minneapolis, MN, September 2015
The Samvera Community's Annual Report for 2017. This report may be of particular interest as it explains the reasons for the change of name from the 'Hydra Project'.
A presentation given at Hydra Connect 2016, described thus and In the UK, the Universities of York and Hull are looking at Archivematica's place in a research data pipeline. The two universities have slightly different use cases but share the desire to put research (and likely other) content through Archivematica on its way to the repository thus giving us a solid base for long-term preservation. We are both now in the third phase of a joint project to build proof-of-concepts to illustrate how Hydra and Archivematica can work together to manage and preserve research data. Since our project began, Jisc have launched an ambitious UK national research data shared service where a range of suppliers offer systems in different lots. Both Hydra / Fedora and Islandora / Fedora are part of the the ‘research repository’ lot of the service and the work of York and Hull has heavily informed the ‘preservation’ lot, with Archivematica one of the systems on offer. This presentation will describe the proof-of-concept work done by Hull and York, and will provide an overview of the new Jisc service.
An overview of the Samvera Community in fall 2019 written as a companion document to the Samvera Roadmap Council's white paper describing the state of the technology.
to identify the questions that arise about Samvera and how these can be best answered, A presentation given at Samvera Connect 2018 described thus, The Samvera Marketing Working Group has been active since May 2018. The WG has had two areas of focus, and and to develop materials that can be used to market Samvera. Both areas recognise the need to has been working towards the production of both key messages and communications that can be used by the community when presenting on Samvera to both internal and external audiences. This session will combine a presentation of the output from this work for others to take away and use with a mini-workshop to allow attendees to feed back on the materials and identify priorities for future marketing development. A video recording of this session is available at the 'Related URL' below.
The Fundraising Working Group was chartered at the behest of Partners. It was to investigate the idea of seeking sponsorship for Samvera’s annual Connect conference, to manage Samvera’s 2019 fundraising appeal to Partners, and to investigate how Samvera might create a much greater annual income in order to support the hiring of staff. This is the Working Group's final report.
A presentation at the Open Repositories conference in 2014. There are those who perceive that implementing, running and maintaining a Fedora-based digital repository is a daunting task suited only to institutions with a significant team of developers and support staff. This paper offers a different perspective. The University of Hull in the UK, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC) provide three case studies of Hydra-based repositories that are centred on a single developer working with small, limited or no support. This talk will compare and contrast their experiences and explain why the developers concerned feel that creating and maintaining these successful repositories has been worth their time and effort.
This article centres on the recently completed REMAP Project undertaken at the University of Hull, which has been a key step toward realising a larger vision of the role a repository can play in enabling and supporting digital content management for an institution. The first step was the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded RepoMMan Project that the team undertook between 2005 and 2007. The second step has been the REMAP Project itself, a key component of a university's information management. In this vision the institutional repository provides not only a showcase for finished digital output, but also a workspace in which members of the University can, if they wish, develop those same materials." This remains the case but with REMAP we added in notions of records management and digital preservation (RMDP) once the materials were placed in the repository. Thus the repository can play a key part throughout the lifetime of the content. It turns out that others share this vision of repository-enabled management over the full lifecycle of born-digital materials, a concept that some are calling the "scholar's workbench". (Others are calling it the "scholars' workbench", Hull uses the Fedora repository software, its development is undertaken by the not-for-profit organisation Fedora Commons. Hull will also be working with King's College London on the CLIF project to December 2010, work that will run in parallel with and complement Hydra. In the Ariadne article describing the work of RepoMMan we wrote, "The vision at Hull was, and is, of a repository placed at the heart of a Web Services architecture, the community has not yet decided quite where the apostrophe belongs!), and JISC-funded again, this second two-year project further developed the work that RepoMMan had started. The third step, more of a leap maybe, is a three-year venture (2008-11), the Hydra Project, being undertaken in partnership with colleagues at Stanford University, the University of Virginia and Fedora Commons
Between April 2005 and March 2009, the e-Services Integration Group at the University of Hull undertook two Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded projects, RepoMMan and REMAP. The RepoMMan tool developed a browser-based interface through which a user could interact with a private digital repository space to support the development of their works-in-progress. It went on to look at the processes involved in publishing such works to a public-facing repository and to investigate the possibility of generating metadata for the published object automatically. The follow-on REMAP Project implemented the publishing process and also investigated how triggers might be embedded in the objects that were created that would help with management and possible preservation of the object over time. The work of RepoMMan and REMAP has now been taken up in an international collaboration, the Hydra Project, which seeks to develop a repository-enabled "Scholars' Workbench". This will be a highly flexible system that will provide a search and discovery interface for a Fedora repository and that can be configured to provide interactive workflows around it for pre-publication development of materials and their post-publication management.
The Hydra Project started in 2008 through a partnership between the University of Hull, the University of Virginia, Stanford University and Fedora Commons (now DuraSpace) to create tools that support use of the Fedora digital repository. Hull adopted the software outputs from this collaboration for its institutional repository in 2011 and remains an active Partner in the community, serving on the Steering Group and fostering development of the community and software in the UK and mainland Europe and The community now has 35 formal Partners and over 70 known adopters internationally. In June 2017 Hydra changed its name to Samvera, Icelandic for 'being together', to recognize the value gained from multiple institutions working together to create the underlying common basis upon which multiple different repository solutions have been implemented. Samvera can be adopted through a set of tools to develop your own repository (using a package called Hyrax as the starting point) and is also available as a complete repository solution, hosted or local, through the use of Hyku. The community has been at the heart of making Samvera a success, and will continue to underpin its future direction.
Powerpoint presentation given at Open Repositories 2009 (OR09) in Atlanta, GA, 20 May 2009 describing the different workflow strategies being developed in the Hydra Project.
A presentation given at the joint meeting of the Fedora UK and Ireland, and the Fedora EU User Groups on 8th December 2009 in Oxford. The presentation describes the 'simple yet flexible' approach of the Hydra partners.
A presentation on the use of Hydra for the management of datasets at the JISC Managing Research Data / DCC Institutional Engagement workshop on components for data management, held at the National College, Nottingham, on 24-25th October 2012. This presentation was given on 24th October within the strand on 'Data repositories and storage', alongside talks on the use of DataStage with DSpace at University of Hertfordshire, and on the use of CKAN at the University of Lincoln.
A webinar given by Rick Johnson and Richard Green for the DuraSpace 'Hot Topics' series in 2012. A recording of the webinar is available by following the 'Related URL' link below.
A presentation given at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 22nd November 2012. The meeting brought together a number of institutions from the UK (and some from Europe more widely) interested in the potential of Hydra. The presentation was one of a number describing the then current use of Hydra in the UK.
A short presentation given during Samvera Virtual Connect 2019 reviewing the work of the Steering Group during the previous months. Both the slides and the script are available for download.