Ambitious "Hydra-in-a-Box" Effort Funded by IMLS - The Digital Shift

"Those who have been paying attention to the cutting edge of digital libraries no doubt know about the Hydra project headed up by Stanford. Hydra is a digital repository system that is built using Ruby and is designed to accept the full range of digital object types that a large research library must manage. Built on top of Fedora and Solr, with Blacklight as the default front-end, one doesn’t normally associate ease of installation with a stack like that. Heck, you could spend a week just getting all of the dependencies installed, configured, and up and running. So color me surprised when it was announced that the Digital Public Library of America, Stanford University, and the Duraspace organization announced that IMLS had awarded them a $2 million National Leadership Grant to develop “Hydra-in-a-Box”. Just as it sounds, the goal is to 'build, bundle, and promote a feature-complete, robust digital repository that is easy to install, configure, and maintain—in short, a next-generation digital repository that will work for institutions large and small, and is capable of running as a hosted service.' That is no small goal, and a laudable one at that. But…gosh. What a distance there is to travel to get there. The project has it pegged at 30 months, so nearly three years. That sounds about right, and so far Tom Cramer has built one of the most broad-based coalitions I’ve seen in academic libraries around Hydra, so you won’t find me betting against him. Especially since he just landed $2 million to help him build out his pet project. So as much as it pains this Cal Bear to say it, Go Stanford!"