Islandora Foundation LSAP: scyllaridae

[Joe Corall]

Lehigh University's scyllaridae repository is a rewrite of Islandora's Crayfish microservice framework (presented at IslandoraCon 2025).

I'd like to propose that the scyllaridae repository moves to the Islandora GitHub org, to be owned by the Foundation and maintained by myself (Joe Corall). If that is acceptable, we can then replace the existing crayfish derivatives with scyllaridae: Islandora-Devops/isle-buildkit#432. That PR provides more of the technical reasons for this change for those interested. A release of that PR would include documentation for existing Islandora installs to migrate from crayfish to scyllaridae.

I am confident if this proposal were to be accepted we could provide community support fairly easily by leveraging scyllaridae to introduce some and/or all of the microservices we've made with this new framework including:

• OpenAI Whisper for automatic A/V transcripts
• Generate PDFs of paged content items
• Streaming Video Derivatives
• Audio thumbnails
• ZIP thumbnails
• WARC Thumbnails
• Convert Microsoft Documents to PDFs
• Many more!

Respectfully,
Joe Corall

[Noah Smith]

Hi Joe- thanks for this! Very impressive work. I recommend bringing this first to the new Roadmap Committee for a statement on how this aligns with Islandora's future directions. That may take a few months - is there any urgency to this? All the best, ~Noah

[Joe Corall]

This piece of software is less about future directions and more about refactoring our existing microservice framework to be more maintainable and extensible.

I initially brought this proposal to TAG and it was recommended I follow the Islandora LSAP procedure.

So this email was sort of a blend of steps 1 and 2 in that process. IIUC we're now on step 3, which is a vote from the Leadership Group (since ICC was merged into the Leadership Group).

If this is not the correct procedure, that LSAP document needs updated.

[comm...@islandora.ca]

Hi all, 

At the Leadership Group meeting last week, we ended up discussing and voting on the proposal to transfer the Scyllaridae and Mirador Integration repos to the Foundation. This proposal was accepted, so we'll be moving forward with both. Thanks especially to Joe, Rosie and Annie in helping to bring these important contributions into the fold. 

We will also be working to update the LSAP document to reflect the new organizational structure.

All the best,
Aubrey Shanahan
Community Manager | Islandora Foundation