When the LYRASIS board of directors asked the staff to look at a repository hosting service for our members, we looked at what was out there.  Our members were looking for digital collections support more than institutional repository workflow, so that moved DSpace down the stack of consideration.  Islandora and Hydra are pretty comparable in terms of functionality, stage of development, and community backing.  The factor that pushed us into the Islandora camp in the end was our previous experience with Drupal and our corresponding lack of Ruby-on-Rails experience at the time.

Developing in Islandora has been a lot of fun.  We jumped on with the 7.x line of code, so we benefited from the experience of others and the significant rewrite from the 6.x line of code.  The Islandora project is fast-moving and is adopting the common good practices out there: the GitHub Workflow, Travis for continuous integration, a growing focus on unit testing, and so forth.  There are a number of sites that are running close to HEAD of the code (we are ramping up our practices to get there) which I think makes for a very vibrant community.  Coming to Islandora cold without Drupal experience can be hard, I think, because there is a certain way you’ve got to make your coding brain work when dealing with Drupal code, but once you get over that hump the theming flexibility  and add-on module support is quite nice.


Peter

On Feb 18, 2014, at 5:43 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?
> 
> 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?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jacob Brown
> Digital Services Librarian
> [log in to unmask]
> 817-257-5339


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Peter Murray
Assistant Director, Technology Services Development
LYRASIS
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