About Hyku for Consortia

Repositories at Scale

PALNI and PALCI Partnership

2021-2023 Hyku for Consortia: Removing Barriers to Adoption

PALNI, in partnership with PALCI, commits to increasing the flexibility, accessibility, and usability of Hyku, the multi-tenant repository platform system. This project extends previous work and improves the national digital repository infrastructure by enhancing an open-source platform suitable for access to diverse types of materials, addressing needs articulated by stakeholders and consortia, and reducing barriers to adoption. See more about this project.


2019-2021 Scaling Up a Collaborative Institutional Repository

PALCI partners with PALNI (representing 94 academic libraries in Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, and New York), to explore, develop, and pilot an open source, multi-tenant, consortial institutional repository (IR). The model intends to deliver ultra low-cost hosting, discovery, and access to digital material for member libraries. Ultimately, project collaborators aim to create a consortial IR service individual libraries may use, customize, and brand as their own, while building the capacity and functionality required to share underlying infrastructure, hosting, and administration costs across institutions. See more about this project.

Project Background

2019 White Paper

2018 Vision

Graphic of a man standing at a desk as a woman hands him papers from a window
Untitled design (9)

Hyku Is ... 


Collaborative
Open Source

Cost-Effective
Sustainable

Shared in Governance
Multi-Tenant

Community Developed
Customizable

The Challenge: Addressing Barriers to Adoption and Current Needs

Project partners are addressing the following challenges and barriers in the changing library landscape with Hyku for Consortia with its current IMLS-funded initiative to support wide-scale adoption and continued development of the open source platform.

Evolving Consortial Needs

  • Consortia merging and evolving to adapt to new fiscal realities
  • Cross-consortial partnerships seek ways to engage in deep collaboration
  • Economies of scale (achieved through consortia) can be applied in new areas

Repository Landscape

  • Currently, only single tenant installations are available, which are unsuitable for consortia
  • Commercial services that do offer hosting are expensive and are not open source
  • Separate repositories at institutions create information silos

Libraries and IRs

  • Available solutions are feature poor
  • Libraries face major obstacles in standing up repository solutions
  • PALNI found that 70% of their schools did not have a repository and 65% were interested in consortial services

Challenging New Materials

  • IRs may need to develop more than just hosting capacities
  • In addition to scholarly materials, many libraries need a solution for Open Educational Resources
  • Modern IRs must support a multitude of new emerging formats

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See How You Can Build a Collaborative Repository