Tom Cramer
Chief Technology Strategist, Libraries
Stanford University
Hydra is a multi-institutional project that gives institutions a framework to build and deploy robust and durable digital repositories (the body) supporting multiple “heads”: feature-rich digital asset management applications with tailored workflows. Its principal components are the Fedora Repository, Blacklight, Solr, and Ruby on Rails.
Initiated in 2008 by the University of Virginia, the University of Hull, and Stanford University, the collaboration is now entering its third year, and has grown to a dozen active institutions and specialized applications for institutional repositories, preservation systems, digital collections management, electronic theses and dissertations, exhibits, media and more. This presentation will delve into both the technical framework and community framework for the project, and review both the strengths and the stumbling blocks of starting and growing a non-grant-funded, distributed open source project of Hydra’s scope and scale from scratch.