A vibrant and welcoming community
“Samvera™ is a vibrant and welcoming community of information and technology professionals who share challenges, build expertise, and create sustainable, best-in-class solutions, making the world’s digital collections accessible now and into the future.”

Benefits of Samvera
We believe that no single system can provide the full range of repository-based solutions for a given institution’s needs and that no single institution can resource the development of a full range of solutions on its own.
Working together, the Samvera Community creates sustainable solutions using a common infrastructure within which there is the flexibility to tailor solutions to local demands and workflows.
Samvera software is free and open source, available under an Apache 2 license.
How it Works
Samvera maintains a set of Ruby on Rails components (Ruby gems) that, together, can be used to build flexible and extensible digital repository solutions. Hyrax combines a number of these components into a toolkit (a Rails engine) for building repository applications to meet a wide range of repository requirements, whilst Hyku is an out-of-the-box repository application with multi-tenant capability built on Hyrax.
Samvera does not work in isolation and relies on a number of external open source components, including:
- Fedora – a durable repository layer for persisting and managing digital objects.
- Apache Solr – a fast and performant search platform
- Blacklight – a discovery platform built on Solr
The Samvera Community
Samvera is not (and has never been) grant funded. It is distributed, robust and open. The Samvera Community was conceived and executed, under its original name “Hydra”, as a collaborative, open source effort from its very beginning in 2008.
Samvera has grown into a vibrant, highly active community including more than 30 Partners who formally support our work and development.
Samvera is designed so that adopters can each have their own mix of features; variation is part of the plan. For adopters who do not have the resourcing to create their own variant, the Samvera Community has developed rather more “off-the-shelf” application bundles.
News & Events
- Call for Proposals for Samvera Connect 2023 in Philadelphia
- Pledge drive to advance the Samvera Hyrax/Hyku Valkyrie integration project
- See the full program and register for Samvera Virtual Connect 2023
- Deadline extended to April 14th! Call for Proposals for Samvera Virtual Connect
- Samvera News March 2023
If you want to go far, go together.
Samvera Partners
- Boston Public Library
- Columbia University
- Cornell University
- CoSector, University of London
- Data Curation Experts
- Digital Repository of Ireland
- Duke University
- El Colegio de México
- Emory University
- Hyku for Consortia (PALNI & PALCI)
- Indiana University
- Lafayette College
- Northwestern University
- Oregon State University
- Penn State University
- Princeton University
- Software Services by Scientist.com
- Stanford University
- Tufts University
- Ubiquity Press
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- University of California, San Diego
- University of Cincinnati
- University of Houston
- University of Hull
- University of Michigan
- University of Notre Dame
- University of Oregon
- University of Utah
- University of Virginia
- Washington University in St. Louis
- WGBH Boston
- Yale University
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.