[Pasig-discuss] NEWS: “Hydra-in-a-Box” DPLA, Stanford University, and DuraSpace Initiative Funded by IMLS

[Carol Minton Morris]

*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*

April 15, 2015

Read it online: http://bit.ly/1OwQQU7
Contact: Dan Cohen (dan at dp.la), Tom Cramer (tcramer at stanford.edu) or Debra
Hanken Kurtz (dkurtz at duraspace.org)

*Far-reaching “Hydra-in-a-Box” Joint Initiative Funded by IMLS*

*A tripartite DPLA, Stanford University, and DuraSpace partnership will
produce a turnkey, Hydra-based solution that can be widely and easily
adopted by institutions nationwide.*

*Boston, MA * The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Stanford
University, and the DuraSpace organization are pleased to announce that
their joint initiative has been awarded a $2M National Leadership Grant
from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Nicknamed
Hydra-in-a-Box, the project aims foster a new, national, library network
through a community-based repository system, enabling discovery,
interoperability and reuse of digital resources by people from this country
and around the world.

This transformative network is based on advanced repositories that not only
empower local institutions with new asset management capabilities, but also
interconnect their data and collections through a shared platform.

“At the core of the Digital Public Library of America is our national
network of hubs, and they need the systems envisioned by this project,”
said Dan Cohen, DPLA’s executive director. “By combining contemporary
technologies for aggregating, storing, enhancing, and serving cultural
heritage content, we expect this new stack will be a huge boon to DPLA and
to the broader digital library community. In addition, I’m thrilled that
the project brings together the expertise of DuraSpace, Stanford, and DPLA.”

Each of the partners will fulfill specific roles in the joint initiative.
Stanford will use its existing leadership in the Hydra Project to develop
core components, in concert with the broader Hydra community. DPLA will
focus on the connective tissue between hubs, mapping, and crosswalks to
DPLA’s metadata application profile, and infrastructure to support metadata
enhancement and remediation. DuraSpace will use its expertise in building
and serving repositories, and doing so at scale, to construct the back-end
systems for Hydra hosting.

“DuraSpace is excited to provide the infrastructure for this project,” said
Debra Hanken Kurtz, DuraSpace CEO. “It aligns perfectly with our mission to
steward the scholarly and cultural heritage records and make them
accessible for current and future generations. We look forward to working
with DPLA and Stanford to support their work and that of the community to
ensure a robust and sustainable future for ‘Hydra-in-a-Box.’”

Over the project’s 30-month time frame, the partners will engage with
libraries, archives, and museums nationwide, especially current and
prospective DPLA hubs and the Hydra community, to systematically capture
the needs for a next-generation, open source, digital repository. They will
collaboratively extend the existing Hydra project codebase to build,
bundle, and promote a feature-complete, robust digital repository that is
easy to install, configure, and maintain—in short, a next-generation
digital repository that will work for institutions large and small, and is
capable of running as a hosted service. Finally, starting with DPLA’s own
metadata aggregation services, the partners will work to ensure that these
repositories have the necessary affordances to support networked
aggregation, discovery, management and access to these resources, producing
a shared, sustainable, nationwide platform.

“The Hydra Project has already demonstrated enormous traction and value as
a best-in-class digital repository for institutions like Stanford,” said
Tom Cramer, Chief Technology Strategist at the Stanford University
Libraries. “And yet there is so much more to do. This grant will provide
the means to rapidly accelerate Hydra’s rate of development and
adoption--expanding its community, features and value all at once.”

To find out more about the Hydra-in-a-Box initiative contact Dan Cohen (
dan at dp.la), Tom Cramer (tcramer at stanford.edu) or Debra Hanken Kurtz (
dkurtz at duraspace.org). An information page is available here:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+in+a+Box.

*About DPLA*

The Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la) strives to contain the
full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art
and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of
science. Since launching in April 2013, it has aggregated over 8.5 million
items from over 1,700 institutions. The DPLA is a registered 501(c)(3)
non-profit.

*About DuraSpace*

DuraSpace (http://duraspace.org), an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit
organization providing leadership and innovation for open technologies that
promote durable, persistent access to digital data. We collaborate with
academic, scientific, cultural, and technology communities by supporting
projects (DSpace <http://dspace.org/>, Fedora <http://fedorarepository.org/>
, VIVO <http://vivoweb.org/>) and creating services (DuraCloud
<http://duracloud.org/>, DSpaceDirect <http://dspacedirect.org/>,
ArchivesDirect <http://archivesdirect.org/>) to help ensure that current
and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage. Our
values are expressed in our organizational byline, "Committed to our
digital future."

*About Stanford University Libraries*

The Stanford University Libraries (http://library.stanford.edu) is
internationally recognized as a leader among research libraries, and in
leveraging digital technology to support scholarship in the age of
information. It is a founder of both the Hydra Project and the Fedora 4
repository effort, and a leading institution in the International Image
Interoperability Framework (IIIF) (http://iiif.io).

*About the Hydra Project*

The Hydra Project (http://projecthydra.org) is both an open source
community and a suite of software that provides a flexible and robust
framework for managing, preserving, and providing access to digital assets.
The project motto, “One body, many heads,” speaks to the flexibility
provided by Hydra’s modern, modular architecture, and the power of
combining a robust repository backend (the “body”) with flexible, tailored,
user interfaces (“heads”). Co-designed and developed in concert with Fedora
4, the extensible, durable, and widely used repository software, the
Hydra/Fedora stack is centerpiece of a thriving and rapidly expanding open
source community poised to easy-to-implement solution.
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