Hydra – Page 2 – Library IT News

Royal Library Presents Chronos

March 12, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

The Royal Library (National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen University Library) recently released a new Hydra application named Chronos.

Details of the project can be found here: http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/afdelinger/db/index.html

The project spanned a little over two years during which the bulk of the work was in establishing policies for long term digital preservation and then setting a strategic plan based on the policies.

The work then segued into the cost models to support the newly developed policies and strategic plan. Using a shared set of principle and guidelines from Collaboration to Clarify the Cost of Curation (http://www.4cproject.eu/), they developed a sustainable cost model for long term preservation of their digital assets.

Once they had policies, strategies and costs established, they moved their work into a more detailed level and focused on the metadata requirements for preservation. The focus was on event data to be stored in PREMIS and structure data to be stored in METS. This led to much more detailed discussions related to the discovery of the digital assets for public discovery as well as metadata required for creating internal reports for performing tasks related to digital preservation.

Once this work was complete, they moved into the process of specifications for the system. They selected Hydra as the best approach for digitally preserving millions of documents. The planning process started in June 2014 and continued through the end of October 2014. This past December work begun on the new system and the week of March 16, 2015 they will release videos and additional information to the Hydra community.

Indiana University and Northwestern University Libraries Receive Mellon Grant for Avalon

March 11, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

Hydra community:

I’m pleased to be able to announce that the Indiana University Libraries, in partnership with Northwestern University Library, have received a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support work on the Avalon Media System project through January 2017.

This funding will help to support the following activities: 1) developing additional features and functionality for Avalon to better meet needs of collection managers and users; 2) conducting studies of use of audio and video collections by researchers in humanities disciplines to help ensure future support for scholarly use; 3) integrating the Spotlight exhibit tool with Avalon to allow librarians, archivists, and scholars to showcase and provide additional context for media items and collections; 4) developing and implementing a community-funded business and governance model to sustain ongoing support and development for Avalon; and 5) deploying Avalon in a hosted software-as-a-service model for use by institutions that need the functionality of Avalon but would prefer to utilize a cloud-based software-as-a-service option rather than support a locally hosted instance.

I’d like to offer thanks to the Hydra community for building and maintaining a solid technical foundation that enables systems such as Avalon to be built and to members of the Hydra community who have assisted with Avalon’s development by providing feedback on requirements and implementation experiences.

More information is available in a press release from Indiana University at http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2015/03/mellon-grants-digital-preservation.shtml

Best,
Jon

—

Jon Dunn

Interim Assistant Dean for Library Technologies

Indiana University Bloomington Libraries

Indiana University and Northwestern University Release Avalon 3.3

March 11, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

Indiana University and Northwestern University are pleased to announce Avalon Media System 3.3. Release 3.3 adds the following capabilities:

MARC metadata Import
Ingestion of pre-transcoded derivatives with multiple quality levels
Script for recovering disk space taken up by temporary Matterhorn files
UI Improvements and Bug fixes

Users of Avalon 3.2 can take advantage of these new features by Upgrading Avalon 3.2 to Avalon 3.3.

For a more comprehensive list of changes, see the 3.3 release notes.

For more details on each of these new features, visit the What’s New in Avalon 3.3 wiki page: https://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/display/VarVideo/What%27s+New+in+Avalon+3.3

Please feel free to try out Avalon 3.3 on our public test server (http://pawpaw.dlib.indiana.edu) before installation. Installation options include virtual machine image, manual installation, and source code installation. More information on all available options can be found on the Avalon web site’s Download page: http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/download

We welcome your feedback on Avalon 3.3 via the avalon-discuss-l discussion list. Join the discussion list at http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/connect

Best regards,

Jon

—

Jon Dunn
Interim Assistant Dean for Library Technologies

Indiana University Bloomington Libraries

Princeton Hydra Release: Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera

March 11, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

Recent Announcement from Princeton:

We’ve finally soft launched our first public application that is serving content from Hydra: http://lae.princeton.edu/. There is still some tweaking to do to Solr and the CSS, but we’re getting close. Staff have been adding data to this application at a rate of 150-300 items per month since for about 6 months now, and we expect to be at a consistent rate of 300/month or more by the summer.

This public interface has some features that may not be obvious to the average end-user:
* All of the images are served via IIIIF (e.g. http://libimages.princeton.edu/loris2/puls%2F0%2Fj%2F0%2Fg%2F1.jp2/full/75,/0/default.jpg)
* The individual catalog pages are displaying data drawn from IIIF Presentation manifests: http://lae.princeton.edu/catalog/0d7hm.jsonld (and, as you can see, also available as IIIF Manifests)
* All of the data is also available as RDF, e.g.: http://lae.princeton.edu/catalog/0d7hm.ttl

Hydra update: Spotlight Latest Version with Screen Casts and Updated Screen Shots

March 11, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

Spotlight is a Hydra head we are currently investigating as part of an Academic Repository project with Central ITS. Here’s the one sentence pitch that defines Spotlight:

“Enable librarians, curators, and others who are responsible for digital collections to create attractive, feature-rich websites that highlight these collections.” – taken from GitHub

Recent Communication to the Hydra Community:

While we are long overdue for a community update on Spotlight, the team at Stanford (Jessie Keck, Chris Beer and Gary Geisler) has been heads down working hard for the past several months. As we near an end of our current development cycle we wanted to report on current status and goals, and share a view visuals.

The current round of development is focussed on three broad goals:

1. Building out an end-to-end, self-service workflow for creating a new Spotlight exhibit using items and collections in the Stanford Digital Repository. Because we have built Spotlight to be repository agnostic, the technical work to accomplish this goal is somewhat specific to Stanford’s digital library architecture. The code developed for this does not ship as part of Spotlight. However, we hope that this can serve as an example and model for others to implement a repository-based self-service workflow for creating new exhibits. We intend to document the workflow we’ve implemented for reference.

A demo of this workflow is now available on YouTube at: http://youtu.be/ZyJ2wzzzunc

2. Enable the addition of items not stored in a formal repository system to a new or existing exhibit. We refer to this feature set as “support for non-repository items”, although we likely want to re-label it. This set of features is intended to make Spotlight useful for those institutions that don’t have a fully baked repository backend with which to integrate Spotlight, or for many good reasons may want to build exhibits from contents not stored in a repository. It also includes the ability to augment any exhibit with non-repsitory items, for example a faculty member or curators local collection of images. We have implemented two approaches:

Single image upload: Using a form an exhibit creator can upload a single image file from their local system and add a few simple metadata fields. If exhibit-specific fields have been created for the exhibit these fields will also be available in the form. Upon submission, the single image and associated metadata is added to items available for building feature pages, and is indexed and available in search results and browse categories.
Bulk-add via CSV: A CSV template is provided to the exhibit creator to populate with a list of image URLs and associated metadata. Upon submission of the CSV, the images are fetched over the web and copied, and indexed records are created for all items. The bulk feature is pulling images in via the web, so exhibit creators can upload images to popular cloud services (box, dropbox, google drive, google images, flickr, etc.) or add any URI to a publicly available image.

This feature is nearly complete, and we’ll send a video demo out in the next few days.

See: https://github.com/sul-dlss/spotlight/issues/787 and https://github.com/sul-dlss/spotlight/pull/842 and https://github.com/sul-dlss/spotlight/pull/895

3. Enhance the visual design and user experience to better support image-heavy exhibits.

The goal here has been to enhance the visual design to provide a more “museum-like” or visually oriented look and feel. Our design team has developed a proposal for a variety of new elements and widgets to produce a more visual, immersive and interactive experience. The developers are just starting to implement these now, and certainly your feedback is welcome. The initial design proposal can be seen here:

https://github.com/sul-dlss/spotlight/wiki/Enhanced-Visual-Design

Of course there are a variety of tickets and features that we have added and will be adding that fall somewhat outside the scope of these high-level goals. For example we have just recently added simple analytics for exhibits using the Google Analytics API – https://github.com/sul-dlss/spotlight/pull/942 .

We anticipate 2-3 weeks more of development on Spotlight and the next release will also include improved documentation and a project site (at something like spotlight.github.io – not claimed or built yet).

We’ll be back in touch soon with more frequent updates as we wind down this phase of development.

-Stu Snydman

****************************************
Stuart Snydman
Associate Director for Digital Strategy
Stanford University Libraries

Indiana University Receives NEH Grant for Digital Preservation using Hydra

March 10, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded the Indiana University Libraries and WGBH Boston a grant to support the development of HydraDAM2. This preservation-oriented digital asset management system for time-based media will improve upon WGBH’s existing HydraDAM system and work seamlessly with the Avalon Media System for user access, among other features.

Both HydraDAM and the Avalon Media System grew from the Hydra community. Hydra is an open source technology framework that supports the creation of preservation and access applications for digital assets based on the Fedora repository system. A community of institutions known as the Hydra Partners works together to maintain the framework and create applications for local or shared use by libraries, archives, and cultural institutions. Both Indiana University and WGBH Boston are among the 25 Hydra Partner institutions. Indiana University is collaborating with Northwestern University on the development of the Avalon Media System and WGBH developed the original HydraDAM system with help from the Data Curation Experts group.

[complete article]

HydraDam is based on the popular Hydra application Sufia. You can view some interesting examples of institutions using Sufia for digital preservation here:

Penn State: ScholarSphere

Notre Dame: CurateND

Case Western: Digital Case

ProjectHydra.org
Avalon Media Systems

Hydra & DuraSpace: agreement for project services

March 9, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

Recent news from the Hydra community, sent by Tom Cramer, Chief Technology Strategist, Stanford University Library:

HydraNauts,

I am pleased to share the news that Hydra has officially entered an agreement for DuraSpace to provide banking, financial and marketing/communication services for 2015, to help support and advance the Hydra Project.

As we have seen some remarkable growth in the last two years, it has become increasingly apparent that a service provider could help meet the project’s growing administrative needs, and help position it for even further expansion. After canvasing the landscape for potential host organizations, DuraSpace appeared as a natural fit for the project, given its overlapping membership, stewardship of other vibrant projects (in particular Fedora), and a shared vision about the future potential of Hydra.

After discussion over several months on the Hydra Partners list and within Hydra Steering, a unanimous vote among the Partners ratified this direction last month. This marks a significant step forward for the Hydra Project in terms of maturity, and positions us well for growth in the coming years. One of the first tasks for us will be to launch a small, volunteer fundraising campaign for 2015; more on that anon!

On behalf of the Hydra Partners and Steering Group,

– Tom

Quarterly Report from Fedora, October – December 2014

March 3, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

March 3, 2015

Read it online: http://bit.ly/1M39u2P

Contact: David Wilcox <dwilcox@duraspace.org>

The Quarterly Report from Fedora, October – December 2014

=================

Fedora Development

=================

In the past quarter, the development team released the production release of Fedora 4.0; detailed release notes are here:

Fedora 4.0.0 Production Release Notes [1]

This significant release signals the effectiveness of an international and complex community source project in delivering a modern repository platform with features that meet or exceed current use cases in the management of institutional digital assets. Fedora 4.0 features include vast improvements in scalability, linked data capabilities, research data support, modularity, ease of use and more. Download the latest Fedora 4 release online [2].

Fedora 4.0 is only the first release in the 4.x line – a number of features [3], including support for Fedora 3 to Fedora 4 migrations [4], are planned for subsequent 4.x releases. The production code sprint schedule [5] includes both feature development sprints and code maintenance sprints (to address issues as they arise). Please consider contributing developer time to these sprints by contacting Andrew Woods (awoods@duraspace.org), the Fedora Technical Lead.

=========

Fundraising

=========

We have concluded our official annual membership campaign, which runs from early May until the end of October (though we will continue to accept new project members throughout the year whenever the opportunity arises). The annual membership goal for 2014 was $500,000, and we exceeded this goal by raising $525,083. The Fedora project has a total of 63 members; this includes 24 new members and 39 renewals from 2013 members. The Fedora Product Manager will continue to coordinate with members of the Fedora Steering Group to expand the pool of DuraSpace members supporting the Fedora project and build a sustainable funding base for the future.

==============================

Community Engagement and Outreach

==============================

In the past quarter, developers have continued to hold daily meetings in conjunction with development sprints, as well as weekly Fedora committer calls attended by the broader community.

Members of the DC Area Fedora User Group met at the National Library of Medicine in October [6] to present project updates and learn about the latest Fedora 4 developments. This group meets twice annually to stay up-to-date on Fedora-related developments in the DC area; the next meeting will be on March 31 at the USDA National Agriculture Library [7].

In an effort to increase international outreach, the Fedora Product Manager traveled to Melbourne, Victoria, Australia to attend the eResearch Australasia [8] conference at the end of October. This was a great opportunity to engage with the regional Fedora community face-to-face, and meet with current and prospective DuraSpace members supporting Fedora.

In December, representatives from Fedora 4 Beta Pilot institutions [9] participated in a well-attended panel presentation at the CNI Fall meeting [10]. The success of the pilot program was an essential part of releasing Fedora 4.0 into production, and we are currently proceeding with another round of pilot projects [11] to support Fedora 3 to Fedora 4 migrations.

==============

Fedora 4 Training

==============

The 4th quarter of 2014 featured three Fedora 4 training workshops. The first training workshop was held in Washington, DC on October 7 following the DC Fedora User Group meeting [12]. It was well attended (32 participants) and the feedback was very positive. The next training workshop was held in Denver, Colorado on October 16 [13] following Islandora Camp CO. Attendance for this event was capped at 30, and it was full with a waiting list. The final October training workshop was held in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on October 31 [14] following the eResearch Australasia conference. This event had 25 attendees and was an excellent opportunity for engagement with regional Fedora community members.

===========================

Upcoming Conferences and Events

===========================

The annual DuraSpace Summit will take place March 11-12 in Washington, DC. This important event is an opportunity for all DuraSpace members to celebrate the successes of the past year and discuss future plans for each of the DuraSpace projects: Fedora, DSpace, and VIVO.

Plans are underway to develop and deliver a 3-day Fedora training event in the Fall of 2015. This event, and the materials developed to support it, will increase engagement with Fedora 4 and provide tools for community members to host their own training events all over the world.

=========

References

=========

[1] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Fedora+4.0.0+Release+Notes

[2] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Downloads

[3] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Roadmap

[4] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Fedora+3+to+4+Data+Migration

[5] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Production+Sprint+Schedule

[6] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/Events/Washington+D.C.+Fedora+User+Group+Meeting+-+6-7+Oct+2014

[7] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/Events/Washington+D.C.+Fedora+User+Group+Meeting%3A+31+March+-+1+April+2015

[8] http://conference.eresearch.edu.au/

[9] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2014+Q4+Draft+Report#

[10] http://www.cni.org/events/membership-meetings/past-meetings/fall-2014/

[11] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Fedora+3+to+4+Upgration+Pilots

[12] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/Events/Washington+D.C.+Fedora+User+Group+Meeting+-+6-7+Oct+2014

[13] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/Events/Denver%2C+CO+Fedora+4+Training+Workshop+-+16+Oct+2014

[14] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/Events/eResearch+Australasia+Fedora+4+Training+Workshop+-+31+Oct+2014

—

David Wilcox

Fedora Product Manager

DuraSpace

dwilcox@duraspace.org

Skype Name: david.wilcox82

New Hydra Adopter: Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF)

February 24, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

New Hydra Partner: University of Alberta

February 20, 2015May 22, 2015 Michael Friscia

We are delighted to announce that the University of Alberta has become the latest formal Hydra Partner. The University of Alberta has well over a decade of experience in large-scale digitization and repository projects, and has a strong team of librarians, developers, data curators and other experts migrating their existing systems to what they are calling “Hydra North.”

In their Letter of Intent, the University of Alberta says that they are committed to using their local needs as pathways to contribute to the Hydra community. Their primary areas of focus in this will be research data management, digital archives, and highly scalable object storage.

Hydra is a Repository Solution