A presentation given at the Open Repositories conference in 2010. In part, the proposal reads and While repositories provide obvious benefits in hosting and managing content, it is equally clear that there is no “one size fits all” solution to the range of digital asset management needs at a typical institution, much less across institutions. A system that supports the submission, approval and dissemination of electronic theses and dissertations, for example, has demonstrably different requirements than a digitization workflow solution, an e-science data repository, or media preservation and access system. There is a clear need in the repository community to readily develop and deploy content-, domain-, and institution-specific solutions that integrate the flexibility and richness of customized applications and workflows with the underlying power of repositories for content management, access and preservation. This paper will provide an overview of Hydra’s philosophy, architecture, and components, as well as demonstrations of various Hydra installations. The paper will also provide a progress report on Hydra development to date and its overall roadmap, as well as provide observations on the successes and challenges of community-based development of shared repository solutions.
Keyword:
Community, Open Repositories 2010, Architecture, Repository, and Hydra
Subject:
Hydra Project
Creator:
Sadler, Bess, Sigmon, Tim, Mene, Willy, Green, Richard A, Staples, Thornton, McRae, Lynn, Cramer, Tom, and Awre, Christopher L
Contributor:
University of Hull, DuraSpace, University of Virginia, and Stanford University
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.
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
Keyword:
Architecture, Workflow, Hydra, Repository, and Jisc
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.
A presentation given to the joint meeting of the Fedora UK and Ireland, and Fedora EU User Groups on 8th December 2009 in Oxford. The presentation was part of the 'scholars workbench' strand.
A short presentation given at the Repository Fringe 2013, held in Edinburgh on 1-2 August 2013. A video recording is available at the 'Related URL' below.
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.
Keyword:
Research data management, Jisc, and Hydra
Subject:
Hydra Project
Creator:
Awre, Christopher L, Green, Richard A, and Lamb, Simon W