Samvera Community Newsletter April 2024
Heather Greer Klein
In this issue:
Register for free for Samvera Virtual Connect 2024, May 7-8, 2024
Announcing Hyrax 5.0.0
Welcome to our next Hyrax Product Owner! Still looking for our next Hyrax Tech Lead
Ramp 3.0.0 (IIIF media player) now available
Upcoming Group Calls
Join the Julie Allinson Award Selection Committee
1 – The full Samvera Virtual Connect 2024 Program is now available!
Samvera Virtual Connect will be held Tuesday, May 7th and Wednesday, May 8th, 2024, from 8:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT/11:00 AM - 2:00 PM EDT/15:00 - 18:00 UTC. Registration is free and everyone is welcome to attend.
Join us for a great lineup of presentations, lightning talks, and updates relevant to developers, managers, librarians, and anyone with an interest or investment in Samvera technologies.
We'll also have breakout sessions before and after each day's plenary so you can catch up on Community developments, make new connections, and learn more about specific software solutions. We'll end the conference with a special breakout session about repository accessibility initiatives, including examples and information about testing, tools, and challenges.
You’re also invited to join the next Samvera Developer Congress, an unconference-style community development event, May 13-17th, 2024.
We hope to see you in May!
2 – Announcing Hyrax 5.0.0
We are pleased to announce the full release of Hyrax 5.0.0. This release includes:
Valkyrie is the default in a new Hyrax application and Valkyrie resources are now the default model type in Hyrax.config
Postgres is the supported Valkyrie persistence adapter. The Fedora adapter is expected to be supported in an upcoming release.
Ruby 3.2 and Rails 6.1 support
Additionally, we have removed deprecated code and addressed many bug fixes.
Full release notes are available at: https://github.com/samvera/hyrax/releases/tag/hyrax-v5.0.0
This release represents years of hard work by the community. We would like to acknowledge the Software Services by Scientist.com, Project Surfliner, Princeton University and Emory University teams who participated in the Community Sprint last year, which was key to completing this work. We’d also like to thank Indiana University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for contributing time to the Hyrax Maintenance Working Group. This was a true Samvera community effort and would not have been possible without them.
3 – Welcome to our next Hyrax Product Owner! Still looking for our next Hyrax Tech Lead
Nicholas Homenda, Head of Digital Initiatives at Tisch Library, Tufts University, has volunteered as our next Hyrax Product Owner. Nicholas will take over the role from Rebekah Kati in November. Thank you Nicholas!
We're still looking for a volunteer Hyrax Technical Lead. The Hyrax Technical Lead does not have to be an expert in all things Hyrax; rather, they will make sure that technical design and architecture decisions and recommendations are made, and keep development work moving along in the Hyrax Maintenance Working Group.
Minimum commitment of 25% FTE for 1 year; institutional reimbursement may be available for a time commitment over 25% (pending funding)
Ideally starting July 1, 2024
See full role description for details
Daniel Pierce is currently the Technical Lead for Hyrax, and would be happy to overlap with a new volunteer before his position in the role ends at the end of June 2024.
4 – Ramp 3.0.0 (IIIF media player) now available
Ramp is a IIIF Presentation 3.0 player for AV materials, and we are proud to announce a new release, Ramp 3.0.0, which involves significant additions to prior functionality. This release of Ramp now serves as the media player for the Avalon Media System, rendering both multi-file media items and playlists within that interface. Note also that Ramp now has a publicly available demo site, in addition to updated documentation of features.
This release was tested in Chrome and Safari on desktop, as well as Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android. We anticipate a bugfix release in the next few weeks to resolve a few cases we found in testing across our large collections at IU, including the addition of support for .srt captions, which are not supported natively by video.js.
Notable Changes from v2.0.0
New components for displaying metadata, supplemental files, markers (highlighting annotations), and auto-advance toggle
Updates to the player UI and structured navigation UI (including resolving some accessibility problems)
New props introduced in IIIFPlayer component to set start Canvas and time, in Transcript component to use a manifest URL instead of listing the transcripts, and in MediaPlayer component to customize player interface.
And more details are documented in the Wiki, which will walk you through upgrading to version 3.0.0
See list of known issues: https://github.com/samvera-labs/ramp/wiki/Known-Issues
We’re excited to have multiple contributors for this release. Thanks to everyone on the Avalon Media System team who contributed code and/or testing:
Dananji Withana
Chris Colvard
Mason Ballengee
Jon Cameron
5 – Upcoming Group Calls - All are welcome
Samvera Tech Call - Every Wednesday at 12pm Eastern
Samvera Outreach & Engagement Working Group - Wednesday, April 17th, 11:30 Eastern
Samvera Metadata Interest Group (SMIG) - Tuesday, April 23, 2-3 pm Eastern
6 – Call for volunteers for the 2024 Julie Allinson Award Selection Committee
Please consider volunteering for the Julie Allinson Award Selection Committee!
The committee makes the call for nominations and selects the recipient of the third annual Julie Allinson Award. The award honors the late Julie Allinson, a beloved Samvera Community member, and recognizes an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the Samvera Community.
Anyone active in the Samvera Community is welcome to join the Selection Committee. The committee is expected to meet 2-3 times before September 2024. Members of the Award Selection Committee are ineligible for award nomination.
To volunteer, please fill out the Doodle poll for the committee kick off meeting or email me directly, hea...@samvera.org
We are also always accepting donations to the Julie Allinson Award fund, which funds the $200 cash award each year.