Samvera – the repository of the future?

Sponsored: Julie Allinson, Lead Developer at CoSector – University of London, on the emerging popularity of Samvera as a hosted repository solution

What is Samvera?

Samvera is a mature digital repository solution. From its outset, the idea was to provide a solid base (the body) on which to create multiple custom ‘heads’. There are many neat examples of Samvera in use ‘in the wild’, from Hull, York and Durham in the UK, the National Digital Repository of Ireland, to repositories at Virginia, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Penn State and many, many more in the United States.  

Why are people choosing Samvera? 

Samvera has a robust community and a stable, yet actively developing, set of components. The Samvera project has been committed to making a virtually turnkey solution – this has never really been possible before. In addition, significant work has gone into making Samvera ‘ready for hosting’, enabling institutions or vendors (like CoSector) to easily deploy services, thereby further reducing the barrier for adoption.  

Why do you think Samvera is the future?

At CoSector, we have been working in the open source community for 15 years, so we understand that Samvera offers the flexibility and adaptability to support new customer requirements for different kinds of repository systems. It also has a strong and innovative community of support for the technology. 

Julie Allinson

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Several things excite me about Samvera. The buoyancy of the community means it’s easy to get involved at any level, be that contributing large chunks to the codebase, organising a working group around a topic of interest, or updating documentation. There is also energy here in the UK around Samvera at the moment with Hull (founding Samvera partners), York, Durham, LSE, Oxford and Cottage Labs all working with the software and talking about collaboration.

The software itself is actively moving forward, with new features and infrastructure changes keeping it vital and current.

What work have you been doing with Samvera? 

Early work with Samvera has seen the Digital Repositories team at CoSector – University of London develop two new software gems that are freely available. In addition, we have contributed enhancements to the IIIF/Universal Viewer implementations and IIIF Search API support. CoSector are also active in community meetings and discussions, as well as having joined a number of Working Groups and Interest Groups. This calendar year we will be hosting the Samvera Europe meetings.

We really do believe that Samvera is the future, which is why we are delighted to announce that CoSector – University of London has become a formal Samvera Partner. We already have some early adopters of the systems we are building using it and we hope to be sharing some updates and insights into our work as our various projects progress. If you are interested in finding out more about the repository systems we are building using Samvera, take a look at our page: cosector.com/research-technologies. 

To learn more, visit samvera.org.

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