Samvera Connect 2021 was held virtually from 18 to 22 October with a pre-conference workshop on Friday, 15 October. The programme had a wide range of activities with community building events, presentations, panels, technology and working group updates. The recordings are available as a playlist on the Samvera YouTube channel. Members of the Advancing Hyku team contributed to Samvera Connect with a panel and a lightning talk.

Lightning Talk/Demo Highlights:

• Samvera Connect participants were excited by Paul Danelli’s recorded demo of work completed by Ubiquity Press in early October 2021 on the ORCID author ID integration. The feature and code contribution were introduced by Ubiquity Press Project Manager Elisa Pettinelli Barrett in a lightning talk on 18 October, Monday.
• This work is part of the author profile services work package in the Advancing Hyku project. With this feature, authors registered in repositories can populate outputs from their institutional repository to their public ORCID profile and vice versa.

Panel Highlights:

Our Hyku Projects Panel: In the Community and In the Wild captured Hyku projects across the community in various stages: -active implementation, nearing launch, and ramping up. Panelists were from – including Advancing Hyku, the British Library’s Shared Research Repository, and Hyku for Consortia. We shared community collaboration activities within Advancing Hyku as well as the code contributions and the remaining work until the end of the project, still on track for February 2022.

The most important goal of Advancing Hyku is to giving what we have achieved back to the community. We put our efforts in avoiding silos, working closely with other projects and unifying the vision of building upon each other’s work within the Samvera community.

To recap, the past 15 months of work:

• we explored what is most needed in the community through a survey and adjusted our project roadmap;
• we shared user stories openly to help in defining specs for feature development;
• and we initiated a collaborative project board to share our development work and progress publicly. This board is now used as our shared Hyku Roadmap across the Hyku community projects, with 5 projects participating to date.


With just a few months until it concludes, the Advancing Hyku project has achieved many of its goals:.

• As we captured in one of our recent blog posts, our developers continuously work with the Samvera community to develop code either new or as an improvement to existing Hyku and Hyrax software platforms.
• The team has completed a Google Analytics plugin in the local instance and ORCID integration in Hyku 3.
• Next, Ubiquity Press will share the analytics code back to the community for adoption in Hyku 3.

Roadmap Update/Remaining Work:


• The excellent initial work on preservation packaging techniques via APTrust’s DART service in Advancing Hyku will be likely to be accomplished through an APTrust and Hyku for Consortia collaboration. This has been a good example of constructive communication between the Hyku community projects in terms of placing the uncompleted and still needed works in the most appropriate projects.

• There is a need to work closely across projects, be open and transparent as much as possible. In the experience of the Advancing Hyku project, conversations among project leads, repository managers and developers across community projects has been extremely useful. For instance, Ubiquity Press recently initiated monthly Hyku technology calls and this had a very positive impact in the feature development and code contributions in Advancing Hyku and across the other Hyku projects.

Being agile and realistic about the project deliverables while holding onto the main objectives is keeping us on track as we transition into the final deliverables of the Advancing Hyku project. The most visible deliverable will be a pilot to migrate open access content from UVA to the completed Advancing Hyku repository environment. Watch for updates on that work early in 2022.