Goals, Activities, & an Update

At the end of 2019, we posted an introduction to our Hyku project, Scaling Up a Collaborative Consortial Institutional Repository (made possible with support from IMLS).  Now we are sharing some of the high-level goals and phases for the project, as well as a status update.  Stay tuned for progress on these activities!

Goals:

1. Contribute an affordable open source IR tool to consortial communities

2. Develop a model for collaboration and shared infrastructure that is easily adoptable

3. Further grow the Hyku community

Activities:

Phase 1: Specification – In progress

• Needs assessment for use cases, workflows, and functionality
• Specification gathering for ETD and OER worktypes and workflows 
• Collaboration with external advisors feedback
• Exploration of consortium scale DOI services 
• Distillation of specifications for development planning

Phase 2: Development – to start in April 2020

• Building collaborative workflows 
• Theming and branding development
• Multi-tenant viewable works and searching
• Enhance data exports for improved discovery
• ETD and OER worktype implementation and versioning
• Integration with external Hyku development efforts 

Phase 3: Pilot and Communication

• Early development testing
• Pilot phase
• Project reporting, documentation, and training 
• Build out sustainability/governance/business models 
• Outreach & communications 
• Contribute code and development efforts back to Hyku/Samvera community

Update:

Working with our Product Management Team’s use case scenarios, we are currently defining improvements we want to make to Hyku to support consortial workflows. So far, we’ve identified the need for more levels of user permissions than standard Hyku offers, and tools to assign users to roles across more than one tenant. These will allow consortia to collaborate together on things like collection development or metadata creation, if they so desire. 

Our next big area for exploration are the needs for easy look and feel customization and feel, and non-repository features of each tenant (things like widgets for displaying featured items, or social media feeds, etc.).  Soon we’ll move on to development of these first two areas, while we continue to flesh out our needs for an ETD worktype and DOI services, among other features. Check back in on this space for more on these in the future.