The Virtual Data Collaboratory Data Services are being built on Samvera, previously known as Hydra, a versatile and feature rich repository solution that is being used by institutions worldwide to provide access to their digital content. The Samvera software offers flexible and rich user interfaces tailored to distinct content types on top of a robust back end – giving adopters the best of both worlds. A Samvera repository solution provides functionality for the full range of CRUD services (create, read, update, delete). To do this it employs a number of Ruby on Rails based components (or “gems”) in conjunction with three other “best of breed” open source software products: Fedora, Solr and Blacklight.
