Happy 2021! Hyku for Consortia Project Update for the New Year

(Feature photo by Olya Kobruseva from Pexels)

We thought we’d kick off the new year with a project update. 

At the end of 2020, as we looked to the end of “Phase 2” of our work (improving features for multi-tenant administration), we took some time to review our project goals with Notch8.  In this review, we laid out the deliverables promised in our IMLS grant and determined a deliberately scoped path to complete these goals by Spring 2021.  We both took stock of our progress to date and identified areas to further define our goals for the sake of efficient progress.  This was done with hopeful anticipation of an additional round of grant funding for Phase 3, in which we plan to remove identified barriers to adopting Hyku, both in and outside the consortial community.  

As a refresher, here’s an overview of our grant goals and deliverables:

Collaborative Workflow Support

Development is currently underway for collaborative workflow support.  Updated scoping for this work now includes:

• An admin can create a new group in a tenant
• An admin can then assign roles to that group 
• Users who are added to a group will receive the permissions from that group. 
• On the user management tab user’s groups as well as any individual permissions granted to the user will be displayed
• Tenant level roles on the User Matrix will be created 

In a future project phase, we hope to add the Multi-tenant Manager and Multi-tenant Editor roles.  We also want to create a groups and permissions area on the consortia admin page that will create one workflow for adding groups permissions across multiple tenants.

Worktypes

Development is also underway for worktype development.  The OER worktype is completed (specs here), with specifications for the ETD worktype are complete and the “shell” worktype (a copy of the generic workype) already created.  Work now underway and now nearly completed includes:

• Metadata customization for the ETD worktype
• Fields will be configured according to the ETD worktype specifications
• Once the fields are configured Bulkrax mappings will be set up for importing and exporting the ETD worktype.

We’d love to further explore easy creation of worktypes in the future, as well as greater flexibility for controlled vocabularies.

Themed Templates

We’ve done a lot of work gathering specifications and mocking up wireframes representing the themes (IR, cultural heritage, and neutral) we’d like to implement as part of Hyku.  Scoped work in this area for the remainder of this project phase are as follows:

• A Theme tab will be added under the Appearance page. 
• On this tab, a user will be able to select a home page theme, a search results page theme, and a work display page theme. This will allow for greater flexibility for repository managers and extend the core offering to a wider range of use cases. 
• The theme pages will respond to the colors, logos, and feature flippers set in the app.
• The following Pages will be built as themes (referencing preliminary mockups):
  • 3 Home Page options (Cultural Repository, Institutional Repository, Neutral )
  • Search Pages with Gallery, Masonry, and Slideshow
  • Images Based and Text Based show Pages.

This is an exciting new development path, and we can’t wait to see how it turns out!  In the future we may make some changes to how the template elements function, and possibly additional options to make the theming as flexible and customizable as possible.

For the remaining deliverables (DOI minting, cross tenant searching, and multi-tenant shared works), we’ll continue to gather requirements from our user communities and explore work being completed in complementary projects. As always, we look to integrate our work with the larger Hyku Roadmap, contributing our improvements back to the Hyku base code and avoiding duplicative development efforts whenever possible.  

We’ll continue to post updates on our project here, and please feel free to contact us with any questions.