Far-reaching “Hydra-in-a-Box” DPLA, Stanford University, and DuraSpace Initiative Funded by IMLS

BOSTON - April 15, 2015 - PRLog -- 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@dp.la), Tom Cramer (tcramer@stanford.edu) or Debra Hanken Kurtz (dkurtz@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.