Materials from Samvera Connect 2019. The conference attracted some 150 people from 40+ institutions to Washington University in St Louis, MO. This collection contains slide decks from presentations and panel sessions, posters from the Poster Reception, photographs and more.
At Samvera Connect 2019 there was a small number of presentations about ongoing work on Wings - "a Valkyrie adapter with data compatibility with Active Fedora" as part of the technology stack under the Hyrax gem. There were references to "Hyrax on Wings" and, almost inevitably, two related hex sticker designs emerged.
A presentation given at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus and This presentation will cover the initial work to move the University of Michigan’s Deep Blue Documents repository from DSpace to Hyrax on Samvera and also merge it with the U-M data repository, Deep Blue Data, which is already on Hyrax. Deep Blue contains more than 120,000 items and has been around on DSpace since 2006. The Deep Blue Data repository started in 2016. Presenters will discuss steps taken so far to migrate and merge the repositories, including creating a minimum viable product (MVP) list, testing migration, addressing challenges so far, collaborating between IT and service providers, and determining next steps.
A preliminary understanding of geospatial metadata An elementary understanding of linked geospatial metadata Practical metadata modeling for Hyrax An introduction to RDF Graph stores for linked spatial data Methods for analyzing spatial linked data as RDF Graphs This workshop aims to provide a set of overviews and technical exercises which shall provide participants with an understanding of linked geospatial data, and what role it could serve within a Samvera repository application. The objective of the exercises will be to provide participants with experience modeling geospatial metadata for Samvera repository resources. Building upon this, an understanding of how this linked geospatial metadata may be indexed for content discovery, or exported into separate platforms for analysis, shall be demonstrated. As much of this work is derived from the undertakings of the Geo. Predicates Working Group, striving to remain aligned with larger community web standards (such as those published by the W3C) should be considered the proper context for any practical usage of linked geospatial metadata. and Slides from a workshop given at Samvera Connect 2019 and described thus
Participants will leave with ideas and methods for how to receive, prioritize, and plan multiple concurrent Library IT projects by taking into consideration the complexity, cost, and impact This half-day hands-on workshop will introduce participants to Michigan’s “Front Door” request intake and cycle planning process. At Michigan, we have designed a cycle planning process to gather requests of all kinds, rate and review, and finally, assign resources as appropriate. The workshop is intended to be a simulation of the cycle planning process from intake to resource planning exercise. The participants will get a feel of how requests are rated and reviewed for cost, complexity, and impact. We will be sharing the tools and templates used at Michigan for reviewing the requests, planning the cycle, and assessing the works’ progress throughout the cycle. and Slides from a workshop given at Samvera Connect 2019 and described thus
Understand what Samvera is and how to participate Understand how to use Samvera Understand the value of Samvera Samvera is a community, a set of tools, and a collection of ready-to run and hosted applications to help build a digital repository for your institution. The community drives the specification and development of sustainable open source technology and honing best practices for managing digital content. This workshop will provide an on-boarding and general entrée to the Samvera community and solutions for non-coders. The first part will provide an overview of Samvera solutions, hosting options and the community – what is it, why is it different? It will showcase applications solving a diverse set of needs and organizations, and discuss the how the community at large works to enable these. The second part will give a general technical overview designed for a non-technical audience. The resources needed to maintain and contribute to a hosted or custom Samvera solution will be discussed, resources that exist to get started will be highlighted plus how to contribute to the community technically and non-technically. The final part will discuss value and how to pitch Samvera and get institutional support. It will discuss the advantages of being part of the community and how that strengthens the sustainability of the tools, the applications, and the community overall. and Slides from a workshop given at Samvera Connect 2019 and described thus
A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus and BrowseEverything is a Gem which provides developers with an API and a set of user interface components for uploading files from cloud storage services and Samvera repository applications. As a core component, this Gem is actively maintained by members of the Samvera Community, and within the past year has had an interest group chartered in order to provide some set of guidance around its continued use and development. While previous releases of BrowseEverything have proven to be robust and sufficient in providing file upload functionality to Samvera applications (most notably, various releases of Hyrax), there exist a number of architectural changes for the codebase which have long been considered necessary in order to improve the user experience provided by the user interface components for the Gem. These will include standardizing the API in order to facilitate those who wish to develop additional drivers for currently unsupported cloud storage solutions. This presentation aims to outline the future proposed changes to the Gem itself, as well as to demonstrate the upcoming design changes for the user interface components. Insight and direction from attendees will be welcome, as we invite all interested parties in shaping the roadmap for this Gem.
A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019, originally titled"Questioning Authority, Questioning authority is a Samvera developed gem that provides a standard way of accessing external authority controlled vocabularies. As part of the Mellon Foundation-funded Linked Data for Production (LD4P) project, this gem was expanded to include a module for general processing of authorities that provide linked data regardless of ontology. This module leverages the existing normalized data format of QA and expands it to include extended context allowing for more accurate selections. Also part of this work was the development of QaServer which is an engine from which you can build a standalone Rails app acting as a service point for submitting queries to QA. The QaServer includes a management UI to explore the availability of authorities and the performance of requests. We will look at recent enhancements to QA, the QaServer UI, a caching system for linked data authorities without an API, metadata entry using extended context, and how we’ve leveraged linked data in some of our user facing applications., and Connecting to Authorities through Linked Data", described thus
A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019, originally titled "Creating a Vision for Samvera", described thus and As Samvera had undergone a shift it its governance over the past 2 years, Samvera Steering wanted to ask Partners to contribute to the creation of a vision for Samvera’s future. The visioning exercise was conducted in April 2019 at the Samvera Partners meeting, involved over 30 community members, and was facilitated by Hannah Frost and Carolyn Caizzi. This presentation will update the community about the process used, the outputs of the exercise, and about any ongoing work to further hone the vision of Samvera’s future.
A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019, originally titled "Samvera Stack Overview", described thus and Samvera can be a daunting stack for newcomers. This presentation is designed to give developers and community members the common definitions and descriptions of the Samvera stack at the application and framework level. Framework topics include discussions around Rails, Sidekiq, Data Stores, Fedora, Solr, Blacklight, etc. While application level topics include discussions around Avalon, Hyrax, Hyku, etc. At the end of the presentation, attendees will have a greater understanding of Samvera's components and how they interact and come together to create a Samvera application.
A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus and This presentation will be a high level overview of the University of Michigan Library's plans for repository technology development. Themes, principles, and plans will be shared. We are continuously challenged to expand our capabilities and extend our reach to match the rapid evolution of research and scholarship in the digital age. We have seen unprecedented rates of content growth in recent years as our campus partners have also advanced in the digital realm. It is no longer just about texts and images. Research data, audio, moving images, and all kinds of complex born-digital materials like enhanced e-books have entered into the scene. The Library has very intentionally placed itself in the center of campus activities for more than two decades. We aspire now, as much as ever, to provide innovative solutions for this unique set of circumstances and uphold our commitments far into the future. We are building next generation infrastructure for digital preservation and access that is adaptable, scalable and sustainable as the needs of campus continue to change.
full-text search and highlighting, advanced search, and more. In addition, a brief demonstration of the installation and setup process will be provided. This talk will also discuss plans for future development and how to build a community of users and contributors for the project., A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus, This presentation will provide an overview of NewspaperWorks, a plugin for Hyrax-based repository applications that provides custom ingest, management, and display functionality for digitized newspaper content. NewspaperWorks can be used to add newspapers to an existing repository, or to create a stand-alone bespoke newspaper content interface. We will cover the major features of this gem, including automated ingest of NDNP batches and PDF issues, newspaper-specific metadata modules, and calendar-based browsing
This session will present a case study of Lafayette College’s repository migration project. We will share our experience modeling, developing, and migrating to a custom Hyrax implementation with a lightweight team of one librarian and one developer working within a small liberal arts college context. The first phase of this migration project centered on text-based digital collections, including college newspapers, magazines, and faculty scholarly output, while future work will focus on migrating image collections into the repository. and A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus
I will use Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to analyze issue backlogs in applications from institutions throughout the community. I will apply a variety of techniques in an attempt to answer questions like, What kinds of open issues do we have in general as a community? Can I extract an interesting set of widely-desired features or widely-held use cases? Can I identify connections that might lead to collaboration across institutions? What solutions already exist that might advance open issues? Can I link open issues in one backlog to merged PRs in another repository? What have people been working on recently? Can we characterize the full set of issues that have been closed over the past year? What patterns of development do repositories follow? Can we describe the life cycle of repository development by aligning issues based on their creation / completion dates relative to the initial commit? These may or may not be the exact questions my talk will address, depending on the direction the project naturally takes. I will focus on applications in use or under development at institutions, as opposed to community-maintained engines and core gems. This talk will describe my process, results, and evaluate the success of the endeavor., and A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus
In 2006, Stanford Libraries built the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR). The system has served us well—thirteen years later, SDR contains over 2.0 million objects (~500 terabytes of content). We built SDR using open-source software (including Samvera, Fedora, and Blacklight) and an additional ~300,000 lines of custom code. We believe it is among the largest and most complex repository systems in research libraries, and yet the challenges we face are common. We have grown SDR to a point where it is extremely difficult for us to sustain. Some of our foundational technologies are not only aging but are beyond end-of-life. Meanwhile, we are challenged to continue offering a valuable, performant, highly-available repository service to our stakeholders. Over the past two years, we have analyzed the factors complicating sustainability, that work has led to operational changes that improve the current state and a plan for sustaining repository development combining open-source and custom software. Our presentation highlights the reasons SDR became unsustainable and shares areas where we have made improvements and where we go next. We believe the lessons we have learned are widely applicable to institutions that develop their own repository solutions., and A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus
Federal law requires a standard of accessibility on any project that receives federal funds. Creating accessible applications is also socially responsible, and implementing these practices can help us set better expectations as community leaders. In a community dedicated to preservation and providing access to to a broad range of assets, accessibility standards should be a priority. We'll explain audits and certification levels, as well as accessibility features that could provide significant value to digital repositories. Using Hyku as an example, a developer will demonstrate practices that are easy to incorporate into the dev process, as well as demo practical examples. and A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019, originally titled "Accessibility Audits & Upgrades in Samvera", described thus
A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus and Agile is an approach to software development that emphasizes team collaboration, continual planning, continual learning, and incremental delivery versus delivering everything at the end, perfectly and all at once. This talk aims to give a high level overview of Agile development and how the academic community could benefit from being more agile. We will cover the 4 core values and 12 principles upon which Agile was founded. We will also cover Agile's most widely used frameworks, Scrum, as a specific use case. We will go over Scrum's roles, events, artifacts, and the rules of how to play this highly collaborative game.
Community and Sustainability", described thus, A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019, originally titled "Avalon Media System, and Over the last two years, the Avalon Media System team at the libraries of Indiana University and Northwestern University has worked toward developing a model of sustainability for a large open source project as part of a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). As the grant comes to a close, the Avalon team will review the efforts undertaken over the course of the two-year cycle, discussing the challenges faced by the Avalon team, as well as points of success. The Avalon team will reflect upon the experience and how opportunities provided by the grant to take on new technical changes to the system, develop code in partnership, work toward better integration with the the larger Samvera community, and develop a smaller, focused community of Avalon users and stakeholders all pointed us toward how Avalon will proceed in the years going forward. The presentation will focus on our path forward focusing on Avalon on Hyrax, new features in recent releases, additional new features being developed on the current code base, and the challenges of aligning complex projects.
Organizations seeking Samvera solutions may have an internal development team, yet find they require external supplemental developers due to internal resource limitations or to bridge a specific technical knowledge gap. Collaborating among divided internal/external teams can be be a productive way of reaching goals within committed timelines, but also has its challenges. We present case studies of Samvera projects that utilized external development resources, highlighting the effects on productivity and budget. We'll also share advice on ways to effectively integrate and maximize a partnership with external developers, including the benefits of their unique experience. Discussion will include effective collaboration tools and other tips to ensure a successful implementation. and A presentation at Samvera Connect 2019 described thus