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 <j.h.br...@tcu.edu> 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
> j.h.br...@tcu.edu
> 817-257-5339


--
Peter Murray
Assistant Director, Technology Services Development
LYRASIS
peter.mur...@lyrasis.org
+1 678-235-2955
800.999.8558 x2955

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