Recent Hyku Development Highlights

Hyku for Consortia Team
Screenshot of the Hyku Commons Homepage
The final months of 2023 saw several small, focused development sprints for enhancements and bug fixes in Hyku Commons. You can see all the tickets marked for these sprints in our GitHub development board (Holiday Sprint, October Sprint, Odds and Ends Sprint), or read on for some highlights. We are also excited about upcoming work to increase efficiency, scalability, and usability.

Odds & Ends Sprint

The Odds and Ends Sprint picked up outstanding enhancement issues that were left over after the IMLS grant period ended. The most significant of these was adding the pdf.js embedded viewer and improvements to the Advanced Search.
  • Enabled Embedded PDF viewer. 
  • Enabled admins to set individual PDF works to either display in the viewer or to display only a thumbnail, requiring download to view. 
  • Added transcript snippet to search results of PDF text.
  • Modified Advanced Search to show priority fields at the top of the page, with additional fields populating with a "show more fields" button. 
  • Added controlled vocabulary dropdown menus for fields with controlled vocabulary in Advanced Search.
  • Added institutional visibility setting in importer. 
  • Changed the default order of subcollections and works on collection pages to A-Z.
  • Added ability to configure front-page menu buttons from the Appearance page.
  • Added critical features to OAI-PMH feed.

October Sprint

The October Sprint focused mainly on administrative workflow items that we hadn't had room to fit into our previous Workflow Sprint.
  • Added image caching for much faster image display and PDF page loading in UV PDV Viewer.
  • Changed the behavior of the Mediated Deposit approval page to redirect the approver back to the updated queue after approval, speeding up and reducing clicks in the approval workflow.
  • New filters for sorting works and collections in their respective dashboards were added.
  • Enabled File Manager to sort the display of files in works that contain both PDF and non-pdf files with the UV PDF Viewer setting.
  • Simplified the process to activate users/assign temporary passwords to users without dev intervention.
  • Added automatic link back to parent work from child work pages. 

Holiday Sprint

The Holiday Sprint brought in a number of previously identified features: 
  • Institution names are now listed in records listings in shared search environments, and the Hyku Commons homepage features a search bar to search all works and collections across published tenants. 
  • Video hosted on external sites like YouTube and Vimeo can be embedded into work records. This is a great alternative to uploading large videos, while still maintaining descriptive control of your a/v video material in a single system.
  • Added the ability to remove roles directly from a user on the user dashboard.
  • Added the ability to configure announcement and marketing text blocks with colors and fonts.
  • Enabled implementation of individual Google Analytics accounts on a tenant-by-tenant basis (still awaiting in-app display of analytics; this relies on work upstream in the Hyrax app, but we expect it in the near future).

Next Steps

We are continuing development in 2024, beginning with key work to the digital infrastructure of the app, with the implementation of Knapsack and Valkyrie, plus an upgrade to Hyku 6.  These improvements are expected to increase the efficiency and scalability of the shared repository.  Next, we have a Maintenance Sprint planned to focus entirely on outstanding maintenance tickets and bug fixes, improving the overall user experience.  As always, we welcome feedback or questions. Please contact us for more information.

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