A presentation given at the Open Repositories conference in 2009. Part of the proposal reads and Repositories have proven themselves as powerful tools for managing digital content in many different contexts. But experience has also shown that there are real, practical limits in trying to extend a single repository solution to meet the manifold needs of most institutions for their full range of digital content and use cases. Relatively narrow and inflexible application front ends can be used to create single-purpose repository-powered solutions, but they do not lend themselves to being quickly and easily repurposed to meet variations in content type or user interactions. There is a clear business need for a flexible, reusable application framework that can support the rapid development of multiple systems tailored to distinct needs, but powered by a common underlying repository. Recognizing this common need, Stanford University, the University of Hull and the University of Virginia are collaborating on “Project Hydra”, a three-year effort to create an application and middleware framework that, in combination with an underlying Fedora repository, will create a reusable environment for running multifunction, multipurpose repository-powered solutions. This presentation will provide demonstrations of the work done to date, including of the prototype ETD application, as well as the set of content models and disseminators that the project has defined so far. The presentation will also present links to the project’s publicly accessible documentation and open source code, as well as solicit the constructive input from community members who may be interested in the project or its outcomes.
Keyword:
Open Repositories 2009, Collaboration, Repository, and Hydra
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
A webinar given by Tom Cramer for the DuraSpace 'Hot Topics' series in 2012. A recording of the webinar is available by following the 'Related URL' link below.
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
