Latest Posts

Yesterday the wonderful developers who make Hydra happen released Active Fedora 4.0.0 and HydraHead 4.0.0

The gems are at:

https://rubygems.org/gems/active-fedora/versions/4.0.0
https://rubygems.org/gems/hydra-head/versions/4.0.0

and supporting libraries at:

https://rubygems.org/gems/om/versions/1.6.0
https://rubygems.org/gems/solrizer-fedora/versions/2.0.0

Hydra Changes:
* Upgrade to active fedora 4.0.0
* Upgrade to blacklight 3.3.0
* Removed railtie to configure active-fedora
* Register solr happens automatically
* Using CanCan gem for authorization
* Compatibility with Rails 3.2
* Compatibility with Ruby 1.9.3
* Select box for :qt has been readded.

ActiveFedora changes:
Removed deprecations
* allowing :fedora level in fedora.yml
* automatic includes of Relationships and FileMethods is removed
Added sharding
Added find_document which determines the correct model and then casts
the object to that.
Improved loading from solr
RDF datastreams
Replaced solr-ruby with rsolr. Note: remove any calls to .hits
load_instance is now deprecated, replaced with find
Find and load_instance_from_solr always instantiate the model defined
in the object.
Run a stub :environment task in the fixture loading rake tasks (which
is overridden by rails)
Find raises ObjectNotFoundError when the object isn’t found
Removed dependency on solrizer-fedora
Avoid unnecessary reload of RELS-EXT when typecasting
HYDRA-754 Delegate discovery of config parameters to a separate module
to allow for non-file-based configuration
HYDRA-753 has_metadata should accept :versionable as part of the spec.
HYDRA-755 Instantiate un-spec’ed datastreams in SolrDigitalObject
HYDRA-758 Added ActiveFedora::Base.exists?
Fixes for Ruby 1.9 compatibility
HYDRA-741 Use fixture loader in repo:* rake tasks. Parameters changed
to foxml and dir.
rubydora to 0.5.7
Lazily load solr config
HYDRA-766 Model#classname_from_uri singularizes terms, but it
shouldn’t change them.
HYDRA-767 Remove Model::DEFAULT_NS
Upgrade Om to 1.6.0
QualifiedDublinCore now extends immediately from NokogiriDatastream
Deprecated MetadataDatastream

The week beginning 26th March was a busy one for the Hydra folks at Stanford University.  Monday to Wednesday they hosted LibDevConX^3, Wednesday to Friday they hosted the first Hydra Partners’ meeting of 2012.

LDCX meetings are about open source library developments in general but a lot of time was devoted to Hydra, Blacklight and Fedora.  35 developers congregated in Palo Alto to share strategies and technologies.  The days included several exercises exploring how components of the Hydra stack might work with components from other solution spaces (such as  Vivo/Vitro and CDL Microservices). Of particularly interest were several discussion on sharing models across institutions, and exploring how to leverage linked data and RDF more fully in Fedora-based installations. See http://lib.stanford.edu/ldcx3

Wednesday saw the start of the Hydra Partners’ meeting – a deliberate overlap with LCDX so that the two groups could share matters of mutual concern.  Major topics for the partners included a technical development plan for leveraging the full capabilities of Rails 3 in the Hydra Stack, plus in depth discussions on Hydra on DuraCloud, and authorization strategies for video delivery.  The next Partners meeting will be June 6-8th at UVa. See https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/March+2012+Agenda+and+Notes

The promised second screencast from Hydra in Hull, covering discovery and delivery, is now available.  You can find it at the foot of this page.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened the doors to its new Library and Archives in January of 2012.  Hydra is playing a key role in digitizing its audiovisual materials to archival standards for long-term preservation and providing open access to them.  Video collections such as the Museum’s 25-year history of induction ceremonies are currently being ingested and cataloged using the Hydra software framework, as part of a larger initiative to build a digital repository of all the Library’s archival holdings as well as the institutional collections of the Museum.  More on their use of Hydra can be found here.

The folks at Hydra in Hull (HiH) are pleased to post their first screencast today.  Whilst the public (you) can use Hydra in Hull to discover and download public content, you can’t see the create and edit side of things.  To solve that, we’ve put together a short presentation so that you can look under the lid.

A second screencast, dealing with discovery and download, and showing some aspects of HiH’s security, will be posted very shortly: keep an eye out!

You can find the screencast at the bottom of the Hydra in Hull page.

The Hydra in Hull team is pleased to announce that it has today successfully switched production from last year’s Rails-2 based system to a new Rails-3 based one.  The Rails 3 version finally gives us full, streamlined CRUD capability within Hydra for new content, meaning that we can discard the temporary, complex ingest workflow that we have needed to use for the last few months.  Additional new features include full integration with the University of Hull’s single sign-on system (Jasig’s CAS), a multi-stage ingest workflow (supporting central and departmental accessioning), the use of sets for both behind-the-scenes management and for basic collection display, and flexible OAI-PMH harvesting for postgraduate theses.  Hull’s digital repository is at hydra.hull.ac.uk

Further to our posting about the AIMS white paper, we have now added information to this Hydra site about Hypatia, the demonstrator that was created alongside the AIMS work.

Like other Hydra heads, Hypatia is open source software and the demonstrator code is available from Github.

We have set up a Hydra events diary where we can list forthcoming Hydra meetings, events at which Hydra will be represented, and other events of potential interest to the Hydra community. You can find it under the ‘News and Events’ tab, or by clicking here.

Recently there has been a small flurry of Hydra gem releases and patches.  These have culminated in:

HydraHead 3.1.2 which can be found at https://rubygems.org/gems/hydra-head

and

ActiveFedora 3.1.1 at https://rubygems.org/gems/active-fedora

HydraHead 3.1.2:

• The main change with the 3.1.x release is the dependency on ActiveFedora 3.1.1.  HydraHead 3.1.x only works with the Rails 3.0.x framework.  Also:
• Update rake tasks to leverage jettywrapper
• Don’t fork processes to run tests Refactor helpers, so that applications can easily override them
• Remove Djatoka support
• Fixed login error messages
• Fixed documentation rake task
• refactoring of AssetsController that makes it easier to override in your hydra-head

Active Fedora 3.1.1:

• adds support for better handling of literal values in the RELS-EXT datastream.
• adds support for setting the controlGroup via a parameter to has_metadata.
• ability to pass a predicate as a parameter to AF::Base#relationships to get a list of the matching targets. This reads a bit better than ids_for_outbound().
• refactoring to support overriding certain sections (ContentModel) by consumers of active-fedora.