With the milestone of Open Repositories 2017 now behind us, and as we head into the dog days of summer, the project team has been steadily working to lay out our plans for the coming weeks and into the fall 2017 season.
The technical team led by Stanford wrapped up the Hyku product beta test in late June. The focus of the test was on the various Hyku deployment options, the application itself, and the growing body of user documentation. A total of 60 individuals from 35 organizations participated in the beta, providing invaluable feedback (and actionable tickets!) based on their testing which is leading to significant improvements in Hyku’s user documentation and technical documentation. Overall we consider the test to be a big success! It was a chance for the community to get their hands on the application with some formal attention from the team and our product was improved as a result of all the activity.
For July and August, some members of the Stanford team remain on Hyku development and hosted service pilot support while others on the team are temporarily reassigned to other local products and projects in need of attention. Also we are involved in the Collection Extensions community sprints taking place in August; the outcomes of these sprints will improve collections in Hyku. In early September, the team will be reconstituted to kick off an effort to implement Hyku for use at Stanford Libraries! We are very excited to work with Hyku at home, continuing to develop features and functionality for the product along the way.
At DuraSpace, HykuDirect hosted service pilots are underway with all six pilot institutions actively adding items and users and testing the features of a fully hosted Hyku repository to see how they meet the needs of their institution. Initial responses have been positive, with pilot institution users noting that the interface has a “modern web” feel and is intuitive and easy to use without the need to consult documentation. Feedback from pilot institutions has helped the team identify and correct several issues and to prioritize development of features and workflow changes.
The HykuDirect team is planning for the production HykuDirect service, and hopes to make more information, including pricing information available in late 2017. Interested institutions can sign up to receive this information as soon as it is available. The team is also working on establishing partnerships with other organizations interested in offering hosted Hyku services. If your organization is interested in providing hosted Hyku services, please get in touch. The team strongly believes that a number of partners offering hosted Hyku with different added services and in different regions and contributing back to the community will strengthen Hyku and lead to better and more diverse service offerings.
The Technology Team at DPLA has completed major portions of design and prototyping of its third-generation aggregation system and is headed into a multi-month work cycle aimed at moving an initial list of 6 providers into production. Development is happening in the open on GitHub and JIRA. Design goals for the new system include being able to handle large providers such as NARA as they scale up, being able to rebuild from raw inputs regularly, and ease of integrations with other data workflows.
That’s the latest update from the Hydra-in-a-Box team. Expect more news in September!