Category: Hyku

Release notes: Hyku v7.0.0 (March 23) and Hyku v7.1.0 (April 7).

Hyku 7.0 came out on March 23 and 7.1 followed two weeks later, so we’re covering both here. 7.0 is a major platform upgrade with visible improvements to viewing and discovery, and 7.1 adds changes for institutions that run Hyku themselves.

HykuUP customers have been running Hyku’s Rails 7.2 code since March 10, and they were on 7.0 the day it was published.

Platform upgrade

Hyku 7.0 moves to Rails 7.2 and puts Hyku back on Hyrax’s main line of development. Through the 6.x releases Hyku ran on its own branch of Hyrax, so fixes made in Hyrax had to be carried over by hand. Now security fixes and improvements in Hyrax reach Hyku directly, and future upgrades should be smaller.

Viewing

The Universal Viewer is now version 4. Keyboard users can tab through a work’s page properly, and search terms still carry from the search results into the viewer.

Discovery

• The sitemap now scales past 50,000 works. The old one couldn’t, and its XML wasn’t valid, so search engines could miss part of a large repository.
• Works carry more of the fields Google Scholar looks for, which helps articles and theses get indexed correctly. HykuUP has had this since December.
• Collections are now OAI-PMH sets, so an aggregator can harvest a single collection instead of the whole repository. Each OAI record also links to the work’s page and thumbnail.

Branding

• A repository manager can try a color scheme, browse the site with it, and then save it as the repository’s default. One click brings the saved colors back after later experiments.
• The new Community theme lays out collections, featured works, and recent works as cards, puts work metadata in two columns, and adds a citation button with copyable MLA, APA, and Chicago citations.

Language field

Depositors can fill in the language field from Library of Congress language lists by typing a language code and picking from the matches. Language values stay consistent across the repository as a result.

Hyku 7.1

• Hyku can now run without Fedora, keeping everything in PostgreSQL. For institutions that host Hyku themselves, that’s one less service to run, monitor, and upgrade.
• Hyku now clears out old temporary upload files on a schedule, so the server’s disk doesn’t slowly fill with leftovers.

To see 7.0 on a live repository, book a demo.

For the full release notes, see Hyku v6.2.0 on GitHub.

Hyku 6.2 is the first release with Flexible Metadata, the change we previewed in our Hyku 6.0 post. HykuUP customers were running 6.2 release-candidate code by late September, so the search and full-text changes below reached them about six weeks ahead of the release.

Flexible Metadata

Until now, a repository’s fields and work types were defined in code. Adding a field meant a code change and a deployment, and every customization made the next upgrade harder. In 6.2 they come from a metadata profile that each repository keeps for itself.

• A repository manager who needs a new field, such as a grant number on datasets, adds it to the profile instead of waiting on a developer.
• The profile also sets which work types a repository offers, so a repository that only collects theses and datasets doesn’t show depositors anything else.
• Field labels come from the profile, so the deposit form uses the names your staff already use.
• Hyku checks a profile before accepting it. A profile with a missing required field or an unsupported work type gets an error message on upload instead of breaking the repository, and Hyku won’t let you remove a work type that already has records.

Controlled vocabularies

A field can now take its values from a controlled vocabulary named in the profile, either a local list the repository maintains or a remote authority such as the Library of Congress. Depositors pick a term instead of typing one, so the same subject doesn’t end up entered several different ways.

Search controls

• Repository managers can leave chosen fields off the search results page, so results show only the fields visitors need to pick the right item.
• A collection can be hidden from search results without changing who can see it, which suits administrative or in-progress collections.
• PDFs with no text layer can still be searched in full. Upload a plain-text file alongside the PDF and Hyku searches its text, which helps with scans where OCR failed or a transcript already exists.

Bot traffic

Search pages are the ones crawlers scrape hardest, and Hyku 6.2 aims its rate limiting at them. Heavy bot traffic is throttled there, so pages stay fast for people.

Batch Create retired

The older Batch Create form, which made several works from one set of metadata, doesn’t work with Hyku’s new storage layer and is switched off in 6.2. Bulk Import covers the same job.

Questions about Flexible Metadata, or about running Hyku on HykuUP? Book a demo and we’ll show you a profile in action.

Post details (not part of the post)

• Title: Hyku 6.2 released!
• Slug: hyku-6-2-released
• Date: November 4, 2025
• Category: News
• Author: HykuUP Team
• Excerpt: Hyku 6.2 introduces Flexible Metadata, so each repository sets its own fields, work types, and controlled vocabularies without custom code.

Most of this release is practical. These are changes repository staff notice the first time they upload a large file, run an import, or search the collection.

Large file uploads

Large files now upload in pieces, through the deposit form and through Bulk Import. A 4 GB video no longer times out halfway through and has to start over, which matters most to anyone depositing video or high-resolution scans.

Bulk Import updates

• Each repository can keep its own Bulk Import field mappings. In a shared Hyku, one library’s spreadsheets can use their own column names or a different identifier column without affecting anyone else’s.
• The import status page loads faster on large imports, so repository managers can check on a big run without waiting on the page.

Search inside PDFs

• Full-text search now reaches inside born-digital PDFs, the kind saved from a word processor rather than scanned. Results for both born-digital and scanned PDFs show a snippet with the matching text, so a visitor sees the passage before opening anything.
• Search terms carry through from the results into the viewer, so a researcher who clicks a result can pick up the same search inside the document.

Branding

• Repository managers have more control over color, including the primary button, so the site can follow campus brand standards.
• Themes can carry their own default colors, and one click puts a theme’s colors back after you’ve experimented.
• A styling pass brought the dashboard, home page, collection pages, and search results in line with each other.

Willow SWORD API updates

Hyku accepts deposits from other systems over SWORD through the Willow SWORD API. This release brings a set of fixes and improvements for the people who build and run those integrations:

• The service document responds faster and no longer times out, and it now lists the admin sets the depositing account can use, so an integration knows where it is allowed to deposit.
• A deposit can name the admin set it belongs in.
• Works and file sets come back with fuller metadata.
• A deposit that doesn’t specify visibility is saved as private instead of failing.

Google Analytics 4

Repositories can now report visitor statistics to Google Analytics 4. Google stopped processing data in the older Universal Analytics in July 2023, so this is what keeps a repository’s usage numbers coming in.

Under the hood

For institutions that run Hyku themselves:

• Background work such as imports and file processing now runs on a job queue stored in PostgreSQL by default instead of Redis, which makes queued jobs easier to inspect and recover after a restart.
• Files can be stored in Amazon S3.

Questions about 6.1, or about running Hyku on HykuUP? Book a demo and we’ll walk you through it.