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.
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.
A workshop given at Hydra Connect #2 described thus and This workshop will offer three detailed demos and case studies of mature production systems from the Hydra community. The contrasting case studies are Hydra@Hull from the University of Hull, Avalon Media Systems from Indiana University and Northwestern University, and ScholarSphere from Penn State University
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 audio recording of the session is available for download below. and A presentation at Hydra Connect 2016 described thus
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 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 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 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.
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.
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
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.