Samvera Community Newsletter August 2026

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Heather Greer Klein

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Aug 3, 2026, 8:00:16 AM (2 days ago) Aug 3
to samvera-...@googlegroups.com

In this issue:

  1. Nominate a community member for the Julie Allinson Award

  2. The Samvera Community joins the Apereo Foundation 

  3. Announcing Hyrax 5.3.0

  4. Avalon Media System 8.2 Released

  5. Verify your repositories in the COAR IRD

  6. Recordings are now available from Open Repositories 2026, with community highlights

  7. All Upcoming Working and Interest Group calls 

  8. In case you missed it: other news from the Samvera Community email list

1 – Nominate a community member for the Julie Allinson Award

The Award Selection Committee invites you to nominate a Samvera Community member for the 2026 Julie Allinson Award. 


Use our easy nomination form to submit your nomination by Tuesday, September 1st, 2026.

The purpose of this award is to recognize an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the Samvera Community.  The award honors the late Julie Allinson, a beloved Samvera Community member who was an incredible mentor, teacher, contributor, and friend.


Individuals nominated should have made a demonstrable impact on the Community in the past 12 months, in any of the following ways:

  • Outstanding support of individuals in the Samvera Community through mentoring or teaching;

  • Meeting Community challenges through technical creativity;

  • Fostering inclusivity and a welcoming Community;

  • Championing Community contribution to meet shared challenges.


Committee Members for 2026

  • Chris Awre, University of Hull

  • Julie Hardesty, Indiana University

  • Jessica McMillen, West Virginia University


Members of the Award Selection Committee, previous awardees, and the Community Manager are ineligible for award nomination. Self-nominees are allowed.


Use our easy nomination form to submit your nomination by Tuesday, September 1st, 2026.

The Committee will review the nominations, select the recipient, and announce the award. $200 USD will be presented to the award recipient.

2 – The Samvera Community joins the Apereo Foundation

The Samvera Community is excited to announce our new fiscal sponsor, the Apereo Foundation. The Apereo Foundation is a global nonprofit organization with over 25 years of experience advocating for open source software in higher education. They share our commitment to open, community-governed, and sustainable software communities. 


The Samvera Community made this change with the full support of Samvera Partners as well as our previous fiscal sponsor, OASIS Open. This new sponsorship arrangement minimizes and simplifies our community overhead costs, ensuring we are maximizing the return on every dollar of contribution to the community.  Apereo will also provide new ways to engage with a broader community of academic open infrastructure.


Apereo is equally excited to learn from our community and the library open source ecosystem. You can read their full welcome message on the Apereo website. 


The Samvera Community will continue to have the same governance structure, including an elected Board. The Community Bylaws will soon be updated to reflect the new fiscal sponsor and the changes will be voted on by Samvera Partners. We expect minimal changes to the day-to-day operations of the Community as we proceed with this transition. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact Heather via Slack or hea...@samvera.org.


OASIS Open has been an invaluable resource to the Samvera Community and their support over the past five years has strengthened our governance and operations. We look forward to an equally cooperative relationship with the Apereo Foundation.

3 – Announcing Hyrax 5.3.0

We are pleased to announce the release of Hyrax 5.3. This release includes the following big features:

  • Flexible metadata

  • Redirect and Canonical URLs for Collections and Works

 

These features are now available in Hyrax following development in the Hyku community. They are fully tested and functional in a Postgres backed environment, and are expected to function similarly in Fedora backed environments as well, though still experimental. These features can be enabled or disabled via application configuration (flexible metadata, redirects) and a dashboard feature flipper (redirects).


Hyrax 5.3 also contains new IIIF related features:

  • Support IIIF presentation manifest V3

  • View PDFs in Universal Viewer

  • Offer Clover as a configurable IIIF audio/video viewer

  • Support VTT captions for video items


Full release notes are available at: https://github.com/samvera/hyrax/releases/tag/hyrax-v5.3.0


Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release through development and testing work:

  • Rob Kaufman

  • LaRita Robinson

  • Shana Moore

  • Daniel Pierce 

  • Randall Floyd

  • Chris Colvard

  • Randy Kuehn

  • Tiffany Chan

  • Kirk Wang

  • Max Kadel

  • Sarah Proctor

  • Tracy McCormick

  • Ryan Orlando

  • Mark Bussey

  • Julie Hardesty

  • Rebekah Kati

4 – Avalon Media System 8.2 Released

The Avalon Media System team is proud to announce release 8.2!


Avalon 8.2 includes improved object management with a revamped permissions model: Units are now full objects with their own staff and user permissions, and permissions are now inherited instead of per-object, making it easy to add read-only access to large collections for specific users and groups. 8.2 also includes support for Audio Description files, forced captions, and the latest version of the Ramp media component library.

Units and Permission Management

  • Units are now full objects where user roles and default access can be set

  • The "Manage" dashboard now allows for management of both Units and Collections

  • A new user role, Unit Admin, allows for ownership and access at the Unit level

  • Users are no longer required to be members of the "Managers" system group to be in a Manager role

  • Item permissions can be set on Units, to be inherited by child Collections

  • Items now inherit permissions directly from Collection values

  • Inherited permissions can be disabled for individual items in the Access Control edit page


Other Features and Changes

  • Accessibility criteria enforcement: a new configuration restricts items from being Published unless media files have associated captions or transcripts

  • Audio Description text track files can now be added to media files and enable an "AD" button in the media player

  • Donor Note field added to descriptive metadata

  • Updates to supplemental file naming for downloads on the item page

  • Legacy XML structure editor removed and replaced with a JSON-based editor in the Structure Metadata Editor tool

  • Improvements to oEmbed responses

  • Updates for automated UI tests with Cypress


Ramp 5.1

  • Support for Audio Description text tracks

  • Support for forced captions

  • Playback position is now saved in browser storage

  • Build system migrated to Vite

  • Added show more/less functionality to transcript cues

  • Player controls now display when Ramp encounters errors

  • New fallback strategy for source selection

  • Markers now sort chronologically on load

  • VideoJS now bundled in Ramp and no longer needs to be installed as a peer dependency

  • React upgrades: React 19 now required for Ramp


Bug Fixes

  • Improved error handling for object type mismatches

  • Fixed a bug causing unnecessary m3u8 calls

  • Timeliner updated to new build with bug fixes and accessibility fixes


Upgrade instructions can be found in the Avalon documentation wiki

5 – Verify your repositories in the COAR IRD

We need your help to keep repository record information up-to-date in the COAR International Repository Directory (IRD). This is important for both Samvera and non-Samvera platforms active at your institution.


For Samvera platforms globally: The Samvera Community serves as the Responsible Organization for all Avalon Media System, Hyku, and Hyrax entries in the COAR International Repository Directory (IRD), regardless of location. You can email Heather Greer Klein (hea...@samvera.org) to add or update your Avalon, Hyku, or Hyrax entries. The community uses the IRD as the source of truth for installations of these platforms, and we appreciate your help keeping entries up-to-date. 

For all non-Samvera platforms in the U.S.: the U.S. Repository Network (USRN) serves as the Responsible Organization. USRN is asking all other U.S. repositories to review and verify their repository record information included in the IRD to ensure accuracy and completeness or to add a new IRD record if your repository isn’t already included. Please check for your repository listing here and then respond about your record using the USRN Google Form. 


For all non-Samvera platforms outside the U.S.: please check the IRD for your record and contact the Responsible Organization listed for your country.  


Thank you for helping strengthen the visibility and reliability of open repositories.

6 – Recordings are now available from Open Repositories 2026, with community highlights

Recordings are now available from Open Repositories 2026! You can access all recordings via links in the conference agenda. Select each day of the conference to view that day's agenda, with links to the video recordings.


Here are a few highlights from those in our community:


Online express lightning talks from presenters around the world, including:


"Repository Showdown" presentations on Hyku by Product Owner Nic Don Staunton-Roark from PALNI, and on Hyrax by Product Owner Nick Homenda from Tufts University.


Presentation "TigerData’s Big Year: Scaling Agile Practices Across Diverse Teams to Support Research Activity," by Kate Lynch and Hector Correa, Princeton University.


Presentation "Unpacking Hyku Knapsack: Sustainable Customization With Less Upgrade Pain," by Shana Moore, Notch8.


The closing keynote may also be of particular interest:

"From rescue to resilience: Strengthening open data infrastructures in times of crisis," by Kathleen Gregory, Leiden University, Netherlands.


7 – All Working and Interest Group calls for the month of August

See all Samvera Community calls, meetings, and events on the Samvera Public Calendar

8 – In case you missed it: other news from the Samvera Community email list

Heather
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Heather Greer Klein (she/her/hers)
Community Manager
Samvera Community
Working Tuesday-Friday from Durham, NC (US Eastern Time Zone), on land traditionally cared for by the Shakori and Eno peoples. 
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