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
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