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.
Building and using an open source community-supported system to manage audiovisual materials for a digital archive/library has many advantages and challenges. Being able to dictate the features, have a system speak to specific needs, and have staff on hand that can change or fix problems is certainly appealing. Embarking on this effort with an established open community, such as Samvera, has the advantages of a robust community of developers and service vendors to turn to for help. Managing needed customisations to core code base, keeping track of updates and contributing to the community, however, is challenging. For WGBH, a public television station with a robust 60-year archive, most customisations are due to the use PBCore to structure the metadata of the audio-visual items. This paper focuses on WGBH’s efforts to build a system for its Media Library and Archives based on the Samvera digital repository framework and its Hyrax and Avalon Media System ‘products’. and Abstract