On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 2:43 PM, Brown, Jacob <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Greetings! A couple quick questions for Hydra or Islandora
> users/developers:
>
> 1) What made you choose your framework over others (for example, DSpace)?
> What is its "killer feature"? Flexibility? More metadata options?
> Availability of SPARQL endpoint? Language? The community?
>
>
​Hi!  We chose Hydra at Penn State after confirming it would meet our
functional (feature checklist) and architectural (multiple apps using a
common, extensible platform) needs​.  The big reason?  The community.
 Community is the heart of Hydra, not Fedora or Rails or any particular
technology.  The consistent growth, technical maturity, and vibrant
collaborative climate are what convinced us that Hydra was the best
community for us to be involved in.

A colleague and I wrote a bit about how community is a fundamental strategy
for our efforts, which touches on how/why we selected Hydra.  You can read
that here if you want more info:

http://www.diglib.org/archives/5288/

The number of partners has doubled each of the past couple years -- we're
now up to 21 partners, with more on the way.  To see the list of partners,
check out the footer of projecthydra.org.​

2) What has your experience been like developing within that framework? If
> you migrated from another digital asset management system, what are the
> comparative strengths/weakness of your framework?
>
>
​Our experience has been extremely positive, and we continue to be engaged
in sustaining and growing the Hydra community and its technologies.  The
overriding strength of Hydra, AFAIC, is the growing number of institutions
that have committed not only to using it but to maintaining it and
improving it; Hydra is organized in a decentralized, distributed manner,
and each of the partners holds a stake in advancing it. I can't say I've
witnessed​ more vibrant or more diverse development communities within
libraryland and that was more important to us than some of the more
tactical concerns like Rails v. Django, Solr v. ElasticSearch, or Fedora v.
whatever.

​Good luck with your fact-finding mission, Jacob!

-Mike
​​