Category: News

Samvera technology is a rich resource available to institutions that have a need for digital repositories and an interest in data preservation.  The stack was dictated by those who use it, and the direction of the technology is kept relevant by the continual guidance of the Samvera community.  However, with the goal of maintaining versatility, Samvera’s core components require a measure of customized implementation work to provide the most value for its users.  That gap between core technology and deployed digital repository can be a challenge to bridge, particularly for smaller institutional departments and organizations with limited budgets or technical resources.  Fortunately, there are multiple Samvera solution bundles designed to build out much of that work in advance, including Hyku.

Hyku is the product from the Hydra-in-a-Box project, lead by the DPLA, Stanford University, and DuraSpace under an IMLS grant. It is a user-friendly, multi-tenant application that gets libraries, museums, and other institutions connected so Samvera digital repository software. An extension of the Samvera base built upon Hyrax, Hyku is easily deployed, easily supported, and puts Samvera within reach for institutions with limited resources.  Key features include the use of Universal Viewer for optimal collection object viewing as discrete customizable theming of multiple repositories under the multi-tenant structure. This last feature is especially significant, as it means one institution can set up one instance of Hyku with several collections branded to specific departments or other collection-specific visual theming.

Like other Samvera solution bundles, Hyku is supported by it’s own open-source community and guided by the Hyku Interest Group. There has been a lot of Hyku activity in the past year, with large-scale projects under way between several community developers and high-profile institutions. Significantly, Hyku was promoted from Samvera Labs in February of 2019, indicating it met all the requirements to move out of the Samvera sandbox and into production use.  

Following this progress, Notch8 is launching HykuUP in 2019, building on a joint project with the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI) and the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI), as well as recent work with New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS). Work from these benchmark projects will benefit the HykuUP product, which will include more enhanced theming customization developed for the PALNI/PALCI project.

HykuUP offers several benefits to adopters, including:

• Fully-Hosted Implementation – hosting and maintenance are provided by Notch8 under a HykuUP subscription, freeing internal IT resources
• Customized Theming – theming options are enhanced beyond even Hyku, with additional expert assistance options available to help match existing brand identity
• User-Managed Data – even non-technical institution staff can manage the data importing to create collections, though Notch8 also offers expert assistance options

Contact Notch8 for more information, or to register for the beta of HykuUP.

Sources and further reading:

• Hyku Roadmap
• Hyku Documentation

Samvera is a versatile set of core software components used to build digital repositories for archival institutions, libraries, museums, and other institutions with a mission and a need for data preservation.  That sounds straightforward, but Samvera can be a confusing concept for those new to the community because it is not simply a software bundle. Although Samvera does involve a technology solution, it is not a specific software product, but an open-source suite of components that are supported by a community.  

 The definition of “Samvera” is incomplete without that word “community.” Samvera is not controlled by a single commercial entity. On the contrary, it is developed and maintained by a roster of developers, educators, and librarians from around the world who are also charting the future for this technology.  Samvera was created with the knowledge that most institutions won’t have the resources to build or commission a robust custom repository solution on their own, but also that no single solution will fit the needs of every institution. In light of this, versatility is a foremost tenet of Samvera. Although based on a common core set of components, the mission of Samvera is to create a common functionality that is flexible and can be applied to a variety of use cases.

Those core components at the heart of Samvera are:

• Fedora – a flexible, modular repository software layer for managing digital objects and storing content.
• Solr – an Apache indexing software that powers the search feature for digital collections
• Blacklight – a search user interface that enhances the Solr functionality with facets, browsing ability, and customized object views
• A Ruby on Rails application – typically Hyrax, that uses a common set of plugins to provide flexible, sustainable functionality

In order to remain flexible and accessible for a broad range of uses, Samvera is necessarily fundamental in its parts.  Specific communities have formed to develop Samvera solution bundles that make implementation and customization more approachable for institutions with limited internal technical resources.  They provide a user interface and a common set of features. These Samvera solutions include:

• Hyrax – an intermediate solution that is the foundation of most Samvera implementations
• Hyku – a turn-key solution, based on Hyrax, that is easy to install, customize, and maintain
• Avalon – a repository solution created especially for audio and video media collections

Whether with a turn-key bundle or through more specialized implementation efforts, Samvera affords a versatile, sustainable, and user-directed digital repository solution for any type of digital archives.

Sources and further reading:

• Samvera.org
• State of Samvera Technology in 2019