Hydra: A Technical and Community Framework For Customized, Reusable, Repository Solutions

Abstract

While repositories provide obvious benefits in hosting and managing content, it is equally clear that there is no "one size fits all" solution to the range of digital asset management needs at a typical institution, much less across institutions. A system that supports the submission, approval and dissemination of electronic theses and dissertations, for example, has demonstrably different requirements than a digitization workflow solution, an e-science data repository, or media preservation and access system. There is a clear need in the repository community to readily develop and deploy content-, domain-, and institution-specific solutions that integrate the flexibility and richness of customized applications and workflows with the underlying power of repositories for content management, access and preservation. Hydra is a multi-institutional, multi-functional, multi-purpose framework that addresses this need on twin fronts. As a technical framework, it provides a toolkit of reusable components that can be combined and configured in different arrays to meet a diversity of content management needs. As a community framework, Hydra provides like-minded institutions with the mechanism to combine their individual development efforts, resources and priorities into a collective solution with breadth and depth that exceeds the capacity of any single institution to create, maintain or enhance on its own.