Hydra Project

Overview

In collaboration with Stanford University, The University of Hull, and Fedora Commons, the University of Virginia Library has joined in an effort to create a set of repository workflow tools to control management, indexing, discovery, retrieval, and preservation of digital materials at all phases of an object's lifecycle. For more information on the larger project, please visit the Hydra Project home portal on the Fedora Commons wiki. The long-term vision of the project's goals are available from the Project's timetable.

U.Va. Hydra Activities

At U.Va., we have committed to the specific tasks of helping to define metadata standards for the project and to creating the search and discovery interface based on our Blacklight discovery interface.

Blacklight

Blacklight is an open source discovery interface which uses Solr to index and search collections. As of the 2.0 release (March 28, 2009), the Blacklight codebase has been refactored as a Ruby on Rails plug-in, allowing libraries to more easily customize the interface and indexing requirements. The Blacklight development project's roadmap is available from the project's development tracking system. U.Va.'s Blacklight implementation is now available as the primary interface to the VIRGO online catalog.

Metadata

Cataloging and Metadata Services Head Jennifer Roper has been working with her colleagues at Hull and Stanford to design the metadata requirements for objects. The descriptive standard chosen for the Project is the Digital Library Federation's Aquifer MODS guidelines. As of April 2009, the descriptive metadata element set is well-defined, while the technical and administrative metadata element sets are still being fleshed out. All metadata element sets remain under discussion as various use cases and test record types are explored by the metadata team.

The Project allows for various adoption levels to assist librarians, scholars, faculty, and graduate students in submitting resources to a Hydra repository. At it's most basic, Level 1 defines a simple set of descriptive data that includes name, title, creation date, location (URL), and any use restrictions for the object. The gold standard for Library-created metadata will be Level 4, which will enable the Library to create rich indexes, allowing for precise discovery accross the entire repository of digital objects. Please see the full explanation of the levels of adoption at the DLF Aquifer implementation guidelines page for more information.