A Hydra Community Story: Breadth vs. Depth? What makes a successful Digital Library?
Session Type: Presentation
Session Description
Breadth vs. Depth
The questions we hear most often are can I deposit my Article? My Dataset? My
Presentation? My Poster? My Video? My Audio? Our answer has often been
well…not yet. The emerging trend is variety, and you cannot focus on any
single work or format type and expect to meet a researcher’s needs. Users have
also been asking for three basic needs: preserve, share, and connect.
In this presentation, we will explore how we have taken a breadth approach combined with community collaboration on the Hydra project to provide basic preservation and access coverage in order to start saying…yes you can deposit and share your article, dataset, presentation, poster, video, and audio.
The Hydra Framework
Isn’t making something work for many content types usually pretty hard? By
leveraging Hydra we are able to easily mix appropriate metadata schemas,
content specific viewers, diverse workflows, and provide diverse access levels
all within the same web interface. We can also integrate with registries like
DOI and ORCID to connect to related materials and increase reuse.
Add the Right Kind of Depth
Don’t users still demand advanced functionality? Often an organization can
spend a lot of time building advanced features for a single content type, but
if they are not tightly engaged with their users they often spend time
implementing the wrong things. In contrast by meeting their basic needs first,
faculty and researchers are able to leverage the repository for their research
sooner and can then tell you exactly what advanced features will help them do
their job better.
Collaboration
Isn’t there still a lot of work to do? By aligning ourselves with like-minded
institutions utilizing Hydra like Indiana University and the University of
Virginia, we are able to divide and conquer, while leveraging the diverse
domain knowledge across the institutions.
Session Leaders
Rick Johnson, University of Notre Dame
Mike Giarlo, Penn State University
Robin Ruggaber, University of Virginia
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View the community reporting Google doc for this session.