It’s only three weeks away! If you will attend the 11th Annual International Conference on Open Repositories (#OR2016Dub), here are the sessions that will be of interest if you want to learn more about the Hydra-in-a-Box project.

Workshop: Modeling your Repository Objects with the Portland Common Data Model (PCDM)

Monday, June 13, 1:30-3:30 PM; 4:00-6:00 PM

Content deposited into the Hydra-in-a-Box repository application is modeled atop the Portland Common Data Model, a flexible, community-maintained, linked data-based domain model for representing a wide variety of digital repository objects. Please join Esmé Cowles (Princeton University), Karen Estlund (Penn State University), Diego Pino (Metropolitan New York Library Council), and Nick Ruest (York University), as they lead participants through an introduction, demonstrations and an interactive modeling session.

This workshop will consist of three discrete portions. The first portion will review the Portland Common Data Model’s history and technical specification paying special attention to the end goals and the effect of the model on the repository community. The second portion of the workshop will demonstrate how PCDM has been implemented in Islandora, Samvera, and Sufia, and the practical impact on the code through UX and design processes. The final portion of the workshop will be an interactive modeling session where users will employ use cases from their repositories (or provided samples) to model in PCDM. The goals of the workshop include: increasing familiarly with PCDM, contributing back to PCDM from the activities of the participants, and increasing participants’ familiarity and comfort with data models.

Designing Hydra-in-a-Box: What We Learned from the Repository Community

Wednesday, June 15, 2016: 9:00-9:30 AM

The Hydra-in-a-Box team has completed an intensive requirements-gathering and design process, marking a major milestone in the project’s overall plan to develop a next-generation repository platform for cultural heritage and research collections. Hannah Frost and Gary Geisler (Stanford University Libraries) will walk attendees through the design process that involved a broad investigation of the current repository landscape using a multi-pronged approach to gather information. This presentation will describe the primary phases of the design process, share key insights emerging from the process, and show how these outcomes provide a foundation for developing the Hydra-in-a-Box repository application product and hosted services.

A Peek Inside the Box: Technology, Architecture, and Community Engagement to Tame the Hydra

Wednesday, June 15, 2016: 9:30-10:00 AM

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Stanford University, and DuraSpace are partners on the Hydra-in-a-Box project, working to develop, bundle, and promote a feature-rich, robust, flexible digital repository that is easy to install, configure, and maintain. Mike Giarlo and Erin Fahy (Stanford University) will describe how this project grew out of the Samvera community. The Samvera framework has been proven to be mature and fully featured, but also difficult to maintain over time without a significant investment of technical resources. And yet, the capabilities afforded by Samvera are of great value even to institutions that lack the resources to sustain Samvera-based solutions. Enter Hydra-in-a-Box.

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the project kicked off in summer 2015 and active software development began in February 2016. The challenge is clear: to “tame” the Hydra by producing a sustainable, cloud-deployable repository solution that: has robust support for widely needed features; is configurable to meet institutions’ divergent needs; and interoperates with a growing national digital platform. Come see a demonstration of an early release of Hydra-in-a-Box and hear about the technology, architecture, and community engagement behind the product.

Hydra at 30 (Partners): Robust Repository Tooling through Community Collaboration

Thursday, June 16, 2016: 9:00-10:30 AM

Hydra (now Samvera) is a community that concerns itself with creating shared repository solutions by collaborating on source code and other initiatives to help us achieve common goals. The past eighteen months have seen releases of the first Fedora 4­-based Samvera applications, continued community growth, major refactoring of existing applications, and, of course, a wealth of new features and end-­to-­end applications. In this presentation Jon Stroop (Princeton University) and Mike Giarlo (Stanford University) will discuss the latest Samvera community initiatives, explain the Samvera architecture and recent updates, highlight the strengths of their technical approach including the use of standards and linked data, and Samvera’s collaborations with other communities. The audience will come away with an updated understanding of how the different elements that now make up many feature-­rich Samvera applications fit together and the current work underway in the Samvera community.