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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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, 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 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
Valkyrie is a new persistence layer for Samvera, supporting multiple backends for storing files and metadata. Currently supported backends include Fedora, PostgreSQL and Solr for metadata, and Fedora and local disk for files. Valkyrie provides an abstraction layer over file and metadata persistence, allowing an application to be configured to use different backends without code changes. This workshop will include, Description, A workshop given at Samvera Connect 2018 described thus, and An overview of Valkyrie's design, including why the Data Mapper pattern was used, and how Valkyrie addresses sustainability issues with ActiveFedora Status updates on current Valkyrie development, including applications built using Valkyrie, and efforts to use Valkyrie in Hyrax Hands-on exercises to give attendees first-hand experience working with Valkyrie and demonstrate how concepts from Samvera applications work with Valkyrie
A workshop given at Samvera Connect 2018 described thus and Have you ever wondered when to use admin sets vs collections, what this new collection type is all about, or how many work types you should have? This workshop will focus on designing approaches for best practices on using admin sets and collections in structuring a repository in Hyrax. We will talk about the basic building blocks available in Hyrax from collecting items to controlling visibility to work types and files. Consideration will be given to various uses cases, from single-use case systems to complex multi-use case systems. There will be time for hands on design in groups of use cases brought by participants.
A workshop given at Samvera Connect 2018 described thus and If you are new to Samvera or considering adoption of Samvera products, this workshop is designed for you! Samvera is a community, a set of tools, and increasingly a collection of ready-to run applications to help build a digital repository for your institution. It is an open source and sustainable community. This workshop will provide an on-boarding and general entrée to the Samvera community for non coders. The workshop will begin with an overview of Samvera community and products– what is it, why is it different. It will showcase some applications that exist, and discuss the how the community at large works. The overview will be followed by a general technical overview designed for non-coders. The staff skills needed to maintain and contribute a Samvera solution will be discussed, resources that exist to get started, and how to contribute code to the community. The workshop will conclude with discussing 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.
This workshop will discuss upgrade strategies, workflows, best practices and common pitfalls. Some familiarity with either Rails or Samvera applications is recommended. We'll go in depth on how we evaluate an application for upgrade, different strategies we recommend and when to use them, and walk through a couple scenarios in depth. and A workshop given at Samvera Connect 2018 described thus
A workshop given at Samvera Connect 2018 described thus and This hands-on workshop will cover tools and techniques to help managers keeping in sync with community development efforts while managing the user expectations and needs. We will cover the dynamics of dedicating responsibilities at the institution and the community level.
An overview of the Avalon solution bundle and the new Avalon components Hands-on activities adding the components to a Hyrax application and using them to ingest and play time-based media, The Avalon Media System is a Samvera-based system for managing and providing access to large collections of digital audio and video. Through version 6, Avalon was known as an independent Samvera solution bundle. In Hyrax-based Avalon 7, the previous monolithic codebase has been broken down into components available for use outside of the solution bundle. These components enhance media playback in Hyrax through robust derivative generation, streaming server support, adaptive bitrate streaming, a IIIF Presentation 3.0 consuming player, and a scriptable embedded player. This workshop will include, and A workshop given at Samvera Connect 2018 described thus
A presentation given at Connect 2017 described thus and In this presentation, we present Fedora 4’s performance in different use cases. These use cases are the most general use cases that were developed by the Fedora 4 performance team. We compare the performance between different versions of Fedora 4 and demonstrate the improvement between these versions. We will also describe the procedures of these performance experiments and demonstrate the software we use (Ansible, AWS, and JMeter). Our performance experiments are conducted in the AWS ecosystem, and we use an R graph tool to visualize the JMeter result. With the AWS grant, we can do many different performance experiments in many scales. Moreover, it is easy to repeat and verify the performance results using AWS. The Fedora 4 performance team wants to know more about the Samvera community’s interests related to the Fedora 4 performance. We plan to gather more use cases from the Samvera community, including middleware such as Solr, Camel, and Fuseki, etc. We can investigate, explore issues, and continue enhancing the future of Fedora 4.
A presentation given at Connect 2017 described thus and Over the past 5 years ScholarSphere has been released 100 times. We will look back at those 100 releases to categorize the releases. I will then share lessons that I have learned through the process of releasing ScholarSphere.
A presentation given at Connect 2017 described thus, Michigan's Research Data Repository has been in production since Feb 2016. Presentation on experiences and challenges of transitioning from Sufia to Hyrax, and adding new features and running the service over the past year.
A presentation given at Connect 2017 described thus, it’s not fun to have an ingest fail overnight and spend the morning tracking down why. Programmatically testing and validating digital object metadata prior to ingest helps us avoid these failures. The metadata itself is managed by Git and stored in GitHub, Several years ago UCSB incorporated Git/GitHub and JIRA into our metadata management and batch ingest workflows. Since then we’ve looked at repurposing other development tools to provide lightweight and automated solutions to problems we often face. One is that we rely primarily on batch ingests when adding content to our Samvera repository. As a result it’s especially important for the metadata to be error-free, and this allows us to run automated checks against any changes using Jenkins and some custom libraries we’ve written for validating CSV and MODS metadata. In this session, we will provide an overall of our current ingest preparation workflow and the tools we are using, and will discuss some of the benefits that have come out of this collaborative effort.
A presentation given at Connect 2017 described thus and Princeton University Library has spent the last two years developing Plum as a staff-only ingest platform for books, manuscripts, geo-spatial data, and archived ephemera. This talk would go through a history of the design goals, the successes we've had, the problems we've run into, and a look into the future.
A presentation given at Connect 2017 described thus and How can presentation layers in Hyrax applications be extended to fit local needs? This session will showcase two front-end implementations of Hyrax for institutional repositories and discuss design decisions we made for specific use-cases.
A presentation given at Connect 2017 described thus and Presentation on a gem for Hyrax models and authorities, which provides a central place for creating models for different types of works. Each new model draws on a central pot of properties to declare the set of properties needed to fully describe the particular work. The gem already exists and has sample models for journal article, thesis and more. In this presentation we will work through the process of defining a new model and then using that model in a Hyrax application. The idea behind the gem is to make it easier for developers to deploy new models, and provide a place for metadata folks to jointly define re-usable models.
Flexible approaches to grouping things in the repository" and described thus, An introduction to the Hyrax 2.1 Collections which include collections extensions, once known as Display Sets. This implementation adds the ability to define collection types with various settings to meet the many use cases for collections from user collections to exhibits. We'll also look at how these play nicely with Admin Sets., and A presentation given at Connect 2017 advertiosed under the title "Collections Extensions and Admin Sets
A presentation given at Connect 2017 described thus and The University of Cincinnati recently migrated our Scholar@UC application from Sufia 7.3 to Hyrax 1.0. We will discuss our process and the special circumstances we had to deal with.
Want to move beyond a simple autocomplete field for controlled vocabularies? Want a more accurate selection process? We will look at a Hyrax demo app that uses questioning authority to search linked data authorities and extracts multiple predicate values from search results to provide additional context in a lookup table to help with the selection process from a controlled vocabulary. The presentation will include direct access to OCLC Fast, locally cached access to Library of Congress and GeoNames, as well as others. and A presentation given at Connect 2017 originally advertised as "Lookup with Context to select metadata values from a controlled vocabulary" and described thus
A presentation given at Samvera Connect 2017 described thus and In this session we will give a quick background of Hyrax and offer a status update on current Hyrax work including the 2.0.0 release and the new testing process for releases. We will also discuss our early plans for the 2.x series of releases including updates on Collection Extensions work, Valkyrie sprints, plans for new Analytics features, and other potential work in the 2.x series. Last, we’ll talk broadly about roadmapping for Hyrax and what we might expect from Hyrax 3.0.0 and beyond.