Hydra in Hull

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/quiteadept/

My next visit to a JISCrte project partner took me to the University of Hull where I met Chris and Richard, the project team working on Hydrangea in Hull (the Hydra demonstrator).

There is a wonderful statue of Philip Larkin (poet and former University of Hull librarian) at the Hull railway station, quite captivating and definitely worth viewing if you ever visit the area. Further information on Philip Larkin is available from the University of Hull archives, see here.

The current repository at the University of Hull is called eDocs  and the Hydra project is developing a new repository for digital materials,  see Hydra in Hull.

The University of Hull is one of the founding partner institutions of the Hydra multi-institutional collaboration and it is hoped that their new repository will facilitate the sharing (openly or on a restricted basis) and preservation of materials for the medium to long-term.

They are using Blacklight as their discovery interface, enabling a single-search interface of the library catalogue and the repository. Further details on Blacklight and Hydra can be found in the links below.

Useful links

• Hydra in Hull project blog
• Blacklight – a free and open source Ruby on Rails based discovery interface
• Hydra Project – a community-driven project “one body, many heads” is part of their vision

If you are interested in exploring more on the open source DSpace software and Fedora framework for building digital repositories then why not register for a free online workshop? It will be held on Friday September 9, 10.00 – 11.00 UK time, further information is available from here.

Running DSpace on a Root URL

By default a DSpace installation will be set up to run on a URL something like http://mydomain.com/xmlui/ or http://mydomain.com/jspui/ depending on which interface you prefer. In a comment on my past post regarding installing DSpace on Debian 5 I was asked how to run DSpace on the root of the URL, e.g. http://mydomain.com/. I had done this in the past but didn’t have a reference to hand so I tried it out on a fresh installation of DSpace 1.7. Here is what I did to get it working.

Installing DSpace on Debian 5

This post is very similar to my recent post covering installation on CentOS but some of the processes are slightly different for the Debian flavour of Linux. This post should cover everything Debian users need to get up and running with DSpace, although it does not cover configuration of the Handle server.  This is described adequately by the official documentation.

Installing DSpace on CentOS 5

Installing DSpace is a reatively long and involved process due to the requirement to build the software using Maven and Ant. The installation is additionally complicated if you want to proxy DSpace through Apache, which will be probably the case if you wish to run any other web software on the server and don’t want to have to enter port numbers to access DSpace. This article will step through the installation process on CentOS 5.5 although some elements with be relevant to other linux distributions and Unix-like OSes.