Samvera Connect 2020 took place virtually between 22-29 October 2020. Of course we missed seeing community friends in person in California, but on the other hand, having it virtual enabled more of us to benefit from Samvera Connect content this year. We met new colleagues, managed to have close conversations in break-out rooms, had great posts and discussions in Slack, and as always, learned about the latest from other Samverans.
Please complete our survey before December 7 (extended!) to rank your priorities for the next generation Hyku repository.
Now back to highlights of Advancing Hyku progress, plans, and challenges presented during Samvera Connect. Above all, we invite you to take part in the very important feature prioritization survey above. In addition, the project partners, (the University of Virginia, the Ubiquity Press and the British Library), covered the project’s goals, their Hyku experiences, the latest developments, ongoing collaborations and plans in the rest of the project timeline. A summary of our many presentations is below, all of which are also available for review from our Outputs page.
Repositories are key infrastructure for enabling users to share research openly. Try Hyku!
From a broader perspective of repositories, Torsten Reimer from British Library delivered a keynote speech on the first day. He pointed out how successfully repositories are positioned with the breakthrough of the open science and research information management agenda while he also drew attention to the difficulty of maintaining the infrastructure as well as providing a good user experience. Torsten presented how collective, shared approach and multi-tenancy can help to overcome some of these challenges based on the experience of Hyku adoption as a repository software solution at the British Library. Advancing Hyku is incredibly fortunate to have Torsten involved and invested in the British Library’s implementation of and future with Hyku.
**But why Hyku?
Advancing Hyku project partners as well as the key collaborators including the British Library, Notch8, PALCI, PALNI, and Ubiquity Press hosted a panel to discuss their perspective and reasons for their choice of Hyku. This panel highlighted the strong community and ownership behind Samvera Hyku, its multi-tenancy features and hosted solution approach, and the possibility of offering shared services as the reasons for adoption of Hyku.
Use persistent identifiers to connect research.
In the poster sessions during pre-conference days, Ilkay Holt from British Library together with Sara Gould led a poster presentation on “Identifiers to Connect Research in Shared Research Repository and Beyond.” This work was about the implementation of identifiers including author IDs (ORCID, ISNI), resource IDs (DOI), organization and funder IDs (ROR crosswalking GRID, ISNI, Crossref Funder Registry, Wikidata) in British Library’s Shared Research Repository. This multitenant, shared repository runs on Samvera Hyku application and the developments made by the Ubiquity Press feed directly into the deliverables of Advancing Hyku.
DOIng more with Hyrax.
Chris Colvard from Ubiquity Press shed light on the DOI plugin in his lightning talk as part of feature alignments in the project with the objective of pushing the code to the core Hyrax codebase. He covered both features of this plugin which are DOI minting and fetching metadata by using DOIs.
Hyku architecture improvements to scale up future repositories.
Francesco De Virgilio and Chris Colvard from Ubiquity Press also presented the architecture of Ubiquity repositories from the perspective of high scalability of Hyku. They outlined the technical architecture that they have implemented including scalability, security, cost-efficiency, performance, reliability, resilience, portability, delivery pipelines for code deployment, error reporting, testing and localization. This work was based on the architecture review done for the Hyku implementation of British Library, which is one of the deliverables of Advancing Hyku.
Your vote matters! Have your say in Advancing Hyku feature prioritization
This presentation launched the call for community input for Advancing Hyku feature prioritization. Major development by Ubiquity Press for the British Library’s Shared Research Repository has been done on Hyku v.1. Some of the code has already been fed back to the community, but a number of other features are not yet in the core Hyku codebase. We need community input as we work on the alignment of these features to upgrade to the latest version of Hyku, to get new features, improvements and to feed them back to the community aligned with the Samvera community standards. The presentation and survey share the list repository features which are either under development or planned for the next year in the project.
One more time: We invite you to take part in the prioritization of these features and provide us with your feedback by completing our short survey before November 22 December 7 (extended!). This will help us to understand which ones are the most desirable to the community so that we can channel our immediate effort in that area as well as enabling us to place them in a spectrum.
These features are complemented with the user stories to clarify the need. Everyone, repository managers in particular, is encouraged to comment if a user story needs adjustment to reflect your experience.
Samvera Hyrax/Hyku adopters are the primary audience for this study but the wider repository community’s input is also very much valuable in terms of understanding the needs both for the future adopters of Hyku as well as institutions with planned or existing Hyku implementations.
The survey and the user stories will remain open for the community input until December 7. We plan to share the results in mid-December. We are looking forward to hearing from the repository community.
-Ilkay Holt and Ellen Ramsey for Advancing Hyku