Press Release

Samvera Advances Community-Sourced Repository Solutions as OASIS Foundation-as-a-Service Partner

New Alliance Promotes Wide Adoption of Free Tools that Make the World’s Digital Collections Accessible Now and Into the Future

15 June 2021 – OASIS Open, the international open source and open standards consortium, and Samvera, an international open source community with best in class digital asset management solutions, are pleased to announce their Foundation-as-a-Service partnership. The program streamlines the process of forming and running foundations by letting groups operate independently while enjoying the benefits of the OASIS nonprofit corporate structure and expertise.

A vibrant community of information and technology professionals, Samvera’s suite of repository software tools offers flexible and rich user interfaces tailored to distinct content types on top of a robust back end, and can enable a wide range of repository solutions for the digital collections held by libraries, archives, museums, and other organizations.

“There is unanimous support in the Samvera Community for this transition to OASIS Open’s Foundation as a Service,” said Rosalyn Metz, Associate Dean of Library Technology and Digital Strategies at Emory University Libraries and Samvera Board Chair. “Being aligned with OASIS, while maintaining Samvera’s well established governance structure and sovereignty, gives us the best of both worlds. We believe this partnership will ensure our autonomy and help promote our sustainability.”

“We are excited to welcome Samvera to the OASIS community,” said Guy Martin, OASIS Executive Director. “This partnership was a natural fit for both of our organizations, as we share the values of inclusivity, openness, and transparency. We look forward to providing Samvera with administration & governance support so that they can continue to focus on delivering value to their users and helping their open source community thrive.”

From its beginning in 2008, Samvera (originally called Hydra) set out to build a community to support and sustain its software, which is free and open source. The Samvera Community creates sustainable solutions using a common infrastructure within which there is flexibility to tailor solutions to local demands and workflow. Its partners include institutions, service providers, and other organizations that have formally committed to contributing to the Samvera Community.

“We are excited to partner with OASIS and have already benefited from the expertise of their program staff,” said Heather Greer Klein, Samvera Community Manager. “Foundation-as-a-Service is an excellent fit for the Samvera Community, and I believe this model offers a new approach to sustainable stewardship of open technologies that we’ve not seen before in the scholarly and cultural heritage ecosystem.”

OASIS welcomes inquiries from groups seeking to form or transition existing open source Foundations using the Foundation-as-a-Service Program.

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