The Chronicles of Hydra

This is the history of major technological changes in the Hydra stack.

• Blacklight
• June 2006. Mediashelf founded
• January 2007. Fedora REST API
• 2007. ActiveFedora created by Mediashelf.
• 2008. University of Hull, University of Virginia & Stanford create Hydra. Mediashelf invited to join.
• Summer 2011. Rails 2 -> 3 upgrade. ActiveFedora3
• Summer 2011. Hydra as an engine
• Spring 2012. Active Fedora is refactored to look and behave much like ActiveRecord. Released as ActiveFedora 4?.
• Summer/Fall 2012. Split the hydra-head gem into hydra-access-controls & hydra-core
• Fall 2012. Sufia an engine was extracted from Penn State's Scholarsphere application
• Spring 2013. Hydra-editor created for Tufts. It is later adopted by Sufia & CurationConcerns.
• Spring 2013. Curate an engine was created to be an easy to use solution (like Sufia), with works that have multiple files.
• Spring 2013. hydra-collections gem started (possibly extracted from Sufia)
• Summer 2013. hydra-derivatives was started (possibly extracted from Sufia)
• Winter 2013. Fedora 4 was started.
• Spring 2014. Worthwhile an engine was extracted from Curate. It uses Sufia models
• Fall 2014. Work for Hydra to support Fedora 4 sponsored by Penn State. This went into ActiveFedora 9.
• Spring 2015. Portland Common Data Model (PCDM) was created. Work on the hydra-pcdm and hydra-works gem began.
• Summer 2015. Worthwhile becomes curation_concerns.
• November - December 2015. Blacklight-access-controls was extracted from hydra-access-controls. This enabled Blackight applications that filtered on indexed access controls. Originally created for Penn State for their ETD application.
• Spring 2016 hydra-collections merged back into curation_concerns.
• Fall 2016. Sipity workflows was extracted from Notre Dame's Sipity project and moved into CurationConcerns (later Sufia & Hyrax)