Second in a series of blog posts highlighting the personas produced in our design process, each representing a typical user of Hydra-in-a-Box and embodying a number of use cases that our repository product, now in development, or the hosted service, now in planning, aim to fulfill.
This week over 260 digital library professionals came together at the Boston Public Library (BPL) for Hydra Connect 2016, the annual meeting of the Samvera community. The BPL buildings – both the historic McKim building with its grand staircase leading up to Bates Hall, and the newly renovated Johnson Building, featuring a large installation of monitors displaying digital images of archival photographs in the BPL’s collections – are a stunning setting for a conference. The BPL hosts a suite of “digital partners”, including the central offices of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). It’s the perfect week to highlight our persona, Alysa Otero, Digital Projects Coordinator of a large regional consortium of public libraries. Alysa’s persona reflects three key needs that emerged in our interviews and conversations with a range of both current and prospective repository adopters, including public libraries. The Hydra-in-a-Box team continues to receive inquiries of interest from U.S. public libraries seeking a better solution for managing their important digital collections.
In this design persona, we see how Alysa is able to easily export a digital collection into a package that can be ingested into the public library’s preservation system. We also read about how Alysa is able to access and download reports about the collections and items in the repository using the administrative dashboard. These reports are important to Alysa, because they enable her to quantitatively demonstrate to her supervisor and the consortium members the level of activity and use of the repository service. With these use cases in mind, the Hydra-in-a-Box team recently participated in a community development sprint focused on two specific features: the import/export functions of Fedora, to enhance its ability to package Samvera content for other preservation systems such as the APTrust or LOCKSS; and an advanced administrative dashboard supporting a range of features that provide key metrics about the repository content and users.
Finally the persona tells how Alysa prepares a feed of metadata for harvesting by the state’s DPLA hub. Contributing to the DPLA is an important way for public libraries, among other institutions with regionally important content, to extend the reach of their collections. The Hydra-in-a-Box repository will support the ability to publish metadata that meets the DPLA MAP v4 specification, and aims to support harvesting by both OAI-PMH and ResourceSync protocols.
Next up in the series, we will explore how Hydra-in-a-Box is useful to a Digital Repository Manager. (You can download all six of the Hydra-in-a-Box personas and other project design documents from the DuraSpace wiki.)