Samvera - a vibrant and welcoming community developing repository software tools Skip to Content About Samvera Samvera is Community Sourced Software for Repository Solutions Philosophy Governance 2019 Annual Report (PDF download) All Annual Reports Interest and Working Groups FAQ Samvera Privacy Policy Licensing What is Samvera? Samvera is an Open Source Repository Framework Samvera Community Overview (PDF download) Technology White Paper 2019 (PDF download) Applications & Demos Technology stack Why Use Samvera? Samvera is Flexible and Extensible The Samvera Community Community Support Sustainability Who Uses Samvera? Samvera Partners Partner Prospectus (PDF download) Partner Contribution Model (PDF download) Samvera Adopters Community Framework Samvera user profiles Case study: Emory University Case Study: Avalon at the University of Houston Getting started General documentation Installation from GitHub Communication Service Providers News & Events News & Events Samvera Calendar Samvera Twitter page Search Samvera.org Close Search for: A VIBRANT AND WELCOMING COMMUNITY Samvera Vision Statement “Samvera™ is a vibrant and welcoming community of information and technology professionals who share challenges, build expertise, and create sustainable, best-in-class solutions, making the world’s digital collections accessible now and into the future.” Samvera’s suite of repository software tools offers flexible and rich user interfaces tailored to distinct content types on top of a robust back end – giving adopters the best of both worlds. '; BENEFITS OF SAMVERA We believe that no single system can provide the full range of repository-based solutions for a given institution’s needs and that no single institution can resource the development of a full range of solutions on its own. Working together, the Samvera Community creates sustainable solutions using a common infrastructure within which there is the flexibility to tailor solutions to local demands and workflows. Samvera software is free and open source, available under an Apache 2 license. HOW IT WORKS Samvera maintains a set of Ruby on Rails components (Ruby gems) that, together, can be used to build flexible and extensible digital repository solutions. Hyrax combines a number of these components into a toolkit (a Rails engine) for building repository applications to meet a wide range of repository requirements, whilst Hyku is an out-of-the-box repository application with multi-tenant capability built on Hyrax. Samvera does not work in isolation and relies on a number of external open source components, including: Fedora – a durable repository layer for persisting and managing digital objects. Apache Solr – a fast and performant search platform Blacklight – a discovery platform built on Solr applications INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES Samvera is being used as a base for a number of institutional repositories (IRs) each of which contains a range of content types. Many of the Samvera partners have developed IR with Hyrax. For instance, George Washington University, UNC Chapel Hill, the University of Hull, UK cultural heritage organisations, and many others have an IR containing electronic dissertations and theses (ETDs), past examination papers, learning materials, journal articles, small datasets and more. For more information visit Samvera Wiki Implementations Information Page. MEDIA COLLECTIONS Avalon, an access platform for online audio and video was developed by Indiana University and Northwestern University using the Samvera stack. Amongst others, WGBH, a public broadcaster in Boston, the University of Virginia, the University of Houston and Washington University are utilizing Avalon and Samvera to manage their digital media content. SOLUTION BUNDLES The Avalon Media System is a collaborative Samvera-based project for managing and providing online access to digital video and audio. It is now available as a Samvera “solution bundle”. Hyku is the result of a collaboration to extend the existing Samvera project codebase to build, bundle, and promote a feature-rich, robust, flexible digital repository that is easy to install, configure, and maintain.  Hyku is a solution bundle that can be installed locally or run in the cloud.  It is based on Hyrax, a Community-developed Ruby gem that allows users to design and build their own, customized installation of our software. DATA AND PRESERVATION The Samvera software is being used as the basis for data repositories, for instance “Deep Blue Data” at the University of Michigan and “Imago” at Indiana University.  The Digital Repository of Ireland is “a national repository for Ireland’s humanities, social sciences and cultural heritage data.” A number of Samvera Partners are investigating the use of our software for dealing with the long-term preservation of research data.  In the UK, the Universities of York and Hull have been integrating the open-source preservation system Archivematica into their Samvera workflows. ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Samvera is being used in conjunction with archives and special collections.  The University of York in the UK has used it as the basis for their Archbishops’ Registers site, providing access to more than 20,000 pages of early manuscripts.  Princeton University has used Samvera to create “Figgy”, a workflow tool for digitizing a wide range of formats including archival materials, ephemera, maps, audio, and coins. PUBLISHING Fulcrum is a community-based, open source publishing platform based on Samvera that helps publishers present their authors’ research outputs in a durable, discoverable, accessible and flexible form. It is hosted on the University of Michigan library infrastructure, specifically designed to curate digital objects. Interoperable with other publishing tools and integrated into the information supply chain, Fulcrum ensures that content is discovered by readers and impact is tracked. Fulcrum aims to implement accessible systems and features and effect change by sharing and maintaining a high standard of accessibility. Previous Slide Next Slide THE SAMVERA COMMUNITY Samvera is not (and has never been) grant funded. It is distributed, robust and open. The Samvera Community was conceived and executed, under its original name “Hydra”, as a collaborative, open source effort from its very beginning in 2008. Samvera has grown into a vibrant, highly active community including more than 30 Partners who formally support our work and development. Samvera is designed so that adopters can each have their own mix of features; variation is part of the plan. For adopters who do not have the resourcing to create their own variant, the Samvera Community has developed rather more “off-the-shelf” application bundles. getting started samvera news News & Events Registration now open for Samvera Virtual Connect, April 20 – 21 Hyku 3.0 Release Includes New Customization Features Season’s Greetings from the Samvera Community Save the Date for Samvera Virtual Connect 2021 Developer resources: Bug Hunting in Hyrax; Adding Blacklight Advanced Search to Hyku view all news IF YOU WANT TO GO FAR, GO TOGETHER. contact us Samvera Partners Boston Public Library Columbia University Cornell University CoSector, University of London Data Curation Experts Digital Repository of Ireland Duke University Emory University Indiana University Lafayette College Northwestern University Notch8 Oregon State University Penn State University Princeton University Library Stanford University Tufts University Ubiquity Press University of California, Santa Barbara University of California, San Diego University of Cincinnati University of Houston University of Hull University of Michigan University of Notre Dame University of Oregon University of Utah University of Virginia University of York Washington University in St Louis WGBH Boston Yale University This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2021 Samvera. 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