Here at CoSector – University of London, we have some exciting news in regards to a new alliance. We have partnered with the open source community, Samvera, to provide new repository systems to customers within the higher education, research and cultural heritage sectors.
The Digital Research Team (DART) at CoSector – University of London has been working in the open source community for over 15 years so the partnership is an important move as Samvera will offer the flexibility that supports new customer requirements for different types of repository systems and it also has a strong and innovative community of support for the technology. These two elements were an important part of the decision to work with Samvera when we were looking to expand our hosted repositories offering.
Early work with Samvera has seen the DART team develop two new software gems relating to Hyrax and Hyku that are freely available. In addition, we have contributed enhancements to the IIIF / Universal Viewer implementations in Hyku and Hyrax and will shortly be working on IIIF Search API support. CoSector – University of London is also active in community meetings and discussions, as well as having joined a number of Working Groups and Interest Groups. For this calendar year we will be hosting the Samvera Europe meetings.
The transition to become a formal partner is a natural progression building on our work with Samvera, which began back in January 2017 when Julie Allinson joined the CoSector team as lead Samvera developer (or Hydra, as it was then known). Julie brought with her a wealth of knowledge and experience of the technology and the community that supports it.
Since Julie introduced the rest of the team to the Samvera community we have all become active members. We have been making code contributions, participating in working groups, taking part in tech calls and attending events such as Samvera Connect.
Becoming a Samvera Partner means we have been able to formalise our work within the community and we look forward to a long and productive relationship with Samvera.
We already have some early adopters of the systems we are building using it and we hope to be sharing some updates and insights into our work as our various projects progress. If you are interested in finding out more about the repository systems we are building using Samvera, take a look at our page here.
