IU’s participation in the Hydra Project: Many Heads, one Repository Solution Framework

Abstract

The Hydra Project is a large collaboration among many institutions sharing needs for open software digital repository solutions. Indiana University is a Hydra Partner, and as such, is both developing new Hydra “heads” and leveraging heads developed by other partners. In this presentation, we will describe the Hydra Project objectives, the primary components of the technology (Fedora, Solr, Blacklight), how the community collaborates, and the benefits of this collaboration. The Avalon Media System was our first Hydra-based project, but now we are also collaborating on a new institutional repository solution as well as a new “page turner” Hydra head for digitized paged media. The Hydra Partner community holds great promise for lower cost, tailorable digital repositories for libraries and archives.