HAPPY NEW YEAR

Wrapping up 2016

Since the last update a significant amount of work has gone into the "mediated deposit" features of Sufia 7.2/7.3 in order to make a transition from a workflow centric repository system such as Dspace possible. The development group for Sufia is wrapping the final issues to cut 7.3, the last official version of Sufia, and the impetus for a new branch of Hydra/Sufia: Hyrax

This has been an exciting and rapid time of development with significant involvment from the CSU. This has allowed our usage needs (i.e. our "user story") to be a driving factor in features that have become core to the Sufia/Hyrax project.

Data Migration Planning

Export/Import Timing and Data Sizing Estimates

Statistics Migration and Reporting

One very important request and consideration is how we will maintain usage statistics when moving between two different system platforms. With that in mind I developed a statistics database with the specific purpose of importing DSpace statistics in such a way that they will both be valuable for historical review as well as usable by the new system in order to maintain usage continuity in one place.

Final deployment plans and location have to be determined, as well as completion of the automation tasks for loading the historical data. But the system is functional locally and will be made available very soon. A sneak peak at what the dashboard will look like:

Jumping into 2017

I was very hopeful that we would have a functional demo complete by the end of 2016 (including mediated deposit), there were a few complications (and limited developer availability over the holiday breaks) at the end of the development cycle that forced us to push our timeline just slightly. However, those issues have been resolved and I should be able to post a functional demo by the end of the week or early next week. So in retrospect, our timeline was only impacted by a few days.

So, what is Hyrax? Simply the evolution of Sufia. During the last couple of months of development it was clear that the merging of hydra gem requirements in Sufia (namely Curation Concerns) was critical and that going forward it would best serve the community to merge the code into a single gem. A rename was required to avoid prior installation of both sufia and curation concerns, so Hyrax was born. That's a long way of saying that this is really just the next version of Sufia. 

Going forward I am very confident that our overall schedule for migration has not been impacted by this change, or the somewhat delayed development efforts.

Review the table above for an initial development timeline. I will be reaching out soon to each campus individually to start reviewing their development instance and scheduling meetings/visits/etc..

I am very excited for the new year and the time in front of us for moving ScholarWorks forward into a world class example of a system-wide repository solution.