A Vision for Hyrax

Our common needs and experiences over the past few years have moved the Samvera Community in the direction of, for a great many of us, convergence on using Hyrax as a platform for our repository work. It is not possible or sustainable for Hyrax to be all things to all parties; the goal of Hyrax is to be an opinionated — though configurable — base for both institutional & data repositories and digital collections management repositories. Thus, we plan to continue building Hyrax in a way that allows it to be used off-the-shelf and as a springboard for highly customized solutions.

While improving daily, the current implementation of Hyrax is more suited to institutional & data repository use cases than it is to digital collections management repository use cases. Expected functionality for managing digital collections such as bulk ingest, edit, and export; database performance; and flexibility around collections and collection types are all noticeably missing from Hyrax. In order to realize the vision of Hyrax serving as a base for both sets of use cases, we propose focusing the upcoming release series on functionality for digital collections repositories while bolstering functionality for institutional & data repositories. (Most of the prioritized functionality will, we believe, be useful in both use cases.)

Development of new features is not our only goal for Hyrax. Feedback from the community is clear that there is a need to shift some of our focus to building more sustainable community practices around code maintenance, documentation, testing, and communication. While not entirely specific to Hyrax, we include suggested improvements in these areas as they will impact Hyrax development and the broader Samvera Community. As we progress in these areas, we will better articulate the resource needs and processes for the continued development of our shared software.

Targeted within the Next Year (from today)

Listed roughly in priority order and the expected order of implementation.  Some efforts may be implemented at the same time.  The priority order may shift based on available resources and community interest.

In progress - project board

Bugfixes & Ongoing Maintenance Work

The Hyrax Working Group is charged with supporting core maintenance and development for Hyrax in order to provide a stable base of support for the solution bundle.  This working group is not meant to be a replacement for community-led development efforts and/or contributions, but rather, it is meant to augment such efforts.  This group may work on some Roadmap Items.  When they do, the group will be identified in the Status Summary section of the item.

Status Summary/Major Activities:

• 2018-08-13 Focus sprint focused on Accessibility roadmap item

Target Date: onging

Lead: Tom Johnson (UCSB)

Working Group: Hyrax Working Group

Issues

Partial work completed - milestone

Hyrax-Valkyrie

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) repository solution which enables the use of multiple disparate storage backends for both files and metadata using the Data Mapper pattern.

Status Summary/Major Activities:

• Conversations at Samvera Connect 2018
• In-person sprint at Penn State -  January  2019
• Upcoming Development Effort - https://github.com/samvera/hyrax/projects/14

Target Date: March 11-April 5 (2, 2-week sprints)

Lead: Tom Johnson (UCSB)

Working Group: Samvera Data Mapper Working Group

In Progress - milestone

Batch RoundTripping of Data (import, export, edit)

Allow bulk ingest and export of content and/or metadata from Hyrax using both command line and user interfaces.

Status Summary/Major Activities:

• Phase One WG outputs
• Coordination of focus and scope with representatives from Batch WG, Avalon, Hyrax, and Hyku (completed Late 2018)
• Oregon Digital is creating an RFP to fund the development of this feature set

Target Date: Winter 2019

Lead: steve van tuyl (Oregon State)

Working Group: This work is related to, but not entirely encompassed by, Hyrax Batch Import-Export WG

Issues

Proposed or Future (more than a year out)

Enhancement Requests (in Issues)