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PALNI and PALCI share latest metadata development sprint for Hyku for Consortia

Hyku for Consortia is excited to report the wrap-up of our metadata-focused development sprint with our partners at SoftServ.  These developments will support robust item descriptions, data consistency, and discoverability of resources in Hyku Commons and beyond. Responding to feedback from our back-end user experience study in 2022 (see earlier post: Hyku Commons Experience Report), feedback from users in Basecamp, and legacy requests, we worked with our community to prioritize feature development around metadata needs that would fit within the span of a single sprint.  More work is to come, but we are happy to share some exciting developments including new metadata fields, rich text support, fixing the value order bug, the ability to upload metadata only-records, and much improved OAI-PMH support. Since community development is a high priority of this project, developments will be contributed back to base Hyku wherever possible. 

New metadata fields

Several new metadata fields have been recently been added to Hyku Commons. Some of these (Access Rights, Rights Notes, and Additional Rights Information) were brought into our project through the base Hyku upgrade. 
 
We also added a custom field called Administrative Note, based on user feedback.
 
Administrative Note is a free text field where users can record information about a work that is not intended to be visible to end-users. Anyone with edit access to the work can see the note, but it is not displayed to logged-out users or users without edit access to that work, such as typical researchers.  See the screenshot of a work entry below with the administrative note field visible.   
 
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Also, while not new, the Resource Type field is now a required field for all worktypes. This will improve the consistency of analytics reporting within our shared system.

Rich text support 

We've heard from our users that they'd like to be able to use elements such as bold, italics, line breaks, and hyperlinking. Most metadata fields in Hyku Commons now support basic rich text editing via Markdown.  See the screenshot of a work entry below with rich text elements visible on the display page.
 
Screenshot of work record with Rich Text elements (bold, underline, italics, and line break) visible in the display page.

Many aspects of  text stylization are supported, but the most common are: 
Fields that link internally are limited from most rich text adjustments, and fields like identifier and license are excluded from rich text entirely. 

Control over metadata value order

Previously, users had limited control over the order of multiple metadata entries in the same field (author names or keywords, for example). This issue has been resolved, and the order keywords that appear in the editor will always match the display order on the public page. This includes when entries are ordered and a work is edited and saved.  This was a highly desired fix that we are excited to implement!

Metadata-only works 

Metadata-only records can now be created through the standard work uploader. The only system-wide requirements to upload a work record now are the required metadata fields for that worktype -- a file is no longer required. This was previously achievable only through the bulk ingest process.  This development better supports our users who want to create records pointing to an external resource and other use cases where no file exists.

Improved OAI-PMH feed 

Previously, only standard Dublin Core fields were accessible by the Hyku OAI feed, which was a barrier for users wanting to share complete metadata records with aggregators and other external systems. Now, the full metadata record for works can be exported through OAI-PMH under the metadata prefix oai_hyku.  The feed also includes a link to individual work files. See the screenshot of an example record below.
 
Screenshot of an individual work's OAI list entry. Complete metdata for the work is shown, starting with identifier and ending with file URL.

Soon we will work to test the new data feed with external systems and make adjustments as needed.  We will also create Hyku Commons-specific documentation, but initial guidance for those interested can be viewed here: https://playbook-staging.notch8.com/en/samvera/oai-feeds. 
 

Remaining Gaps

Other highly desired metadata improvements were identified by the Hyku Commons user community but are not possible to address at this time, since they are multi-sprint developments that will require additional time and resources to complete. We've added the following items to our post-IMLS grant development roadmap:
 
Ability to configure which fields are required (per tenant)
Ability to customize controlled vocabularies (per tenant)
Ability to relabel metadata fields (per tenant)
Ability to reorder field display (per tenant)
Ability to suppress the visibility of metadata fields from public view (per tenant)
Ability to suppress the visibility of non-required fields in the metadata entry form (per tenant)
 

Up Next

For immediate next steps, we will begin a necessary update to the Google Analytics implementation so our analytics are compliant with Google-wide changes coming this summer, and we will fix a few outstanding issues with reports.  Our next development sprint will also focus on back-end administrative workflow-related development, including streamlining appearance color setup, mediated deposit improvements, and work on user/role management.  The final sprint within the span of our IMLS Grant, ending July 2023, will focus on front-end improvements.  Stay tuned for more updates!