Debra Hanken Kurtz
CEO
DuraSpace
Michele Kimpton
Interim Director
Digital Public Library of America
Tom Cramer
Assistant University Librarian & Director, Digital Library Systems & Services Chief Technology Strategist
Stanford University
Hannah Frost
Manager, Digital Library Product and Service Management
Stanford University
Michael Della Bitta
Director of Technology
Digital Public Library of America
After 30 months of dedicated work funded by IMLS to extend and augment technologies to enable a national digital platform for cultural heritage collections, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), DuraSpace and Stanford Libraries provide a final report on all aspects of the Hydra-in-a-Box project, including a demo of the Hyku repository. The goals of the project were ambitious and the partnership has made significant progress to produce a polished turnkey, Samvera (Hydra)-based application for next-generation digital asset management that lowers the bar for users to contribute to DPLA. We have completed pilots of a hosted service to serve institutions not positioned to run the application for themselves. As the grant-funded work concludes, we look to make good on a fourth goal to connect these key infrastructural pieces with DPLA hubs, current Samvera partners, and prospective Hyku adopters—creating a vibrant, participatory community of adopters and contributors. To do this, we must engage with the community to build infrastructure and development strategies to promote more widespread adoption of Samvera technologies. The group of institutions who expressed interest or participated in the pilot ranged widely from large state archives to small non-profit operations and include: the Arizona State Library and Archives, a statewide digital content repository and DPLA hub; the New Hampshire Digital Project, a large public library; the Cleveland Public Library; the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI); the University of Miami; and St. Lawrence University. More than forty organizations expressed interest in joining the pilot project and it’s generated more than seventy leads for the next phase of development. The larger Samvera community involves a range of participants, including nearly sixty partner institutions who participate in regular meetings and commit code to the project, including Hyku. Similarly, those interested in hosting Hyku range from US-based non-profits, open source software companies, and publishers, in addition to international businesses. We’ll conclude the report by presenting opportunities for community members to participate and share in the next phase of the project: integrate Hyku with the larger Samvera community, contribute to the codebase, provide hosted services, and promote rapid adoption of the technology.
Hyku Pilots and Leads https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16nBE1Rlr2CBf8oKtEuS1DE2NlWlpqD3tm0xLeZHqSzw/edit#gid=1896613910
https://hykudirect.com/