The Lyrasis Organizational Home is excited to announce the launch of the CST Interoperability Project. This project is one of the initiatives supported by the CST Growth Fund, a million-dollar investment from Lyrasis’ reserves designed to help community-supported technologies (CSTs) grow for the future.
The CST Interoperability Project will enhance interoperability of each of the CSTs in the Lyrasis Organizational Home family: ArchivesSpace, CollectionSpace, DSpace, Fedora and VIVO. We received many high-quality proposals in response to our Request For Proposals, and Lyrasis is pleased to have retained Jessica Farrell of Redstart Works, a digital archives consultancy, for this first phase of the project. Jess will help us define functional requirements for interoperability workflows. Under the guidance of the Organizational Home and in close consultation with the communities, this project will equitably support each of these important technologies, and center community, sustainability and interoperability. Jess has more than a decade of experience working with or within community-supported technologies at nonprofit hosts, and has created several information technology transformations through Redstart Works.
The final deliverable for this phase, planned for summer 2026, is a requirements package for application integrations that can be handed off to developers in a phase II of this project for implementation. The specifications will include examples of real-world use cases, diagrams of system interactions, dependencies to be developed or addressed before implementation, and recommendations for change management.
Our first milestone is to identify the integration workflows we’ll design specifications for by the end of 2025. This means first identifying the workflow needs of current and potential adopters of each of the CST applications. In addition to being chosen by the communities, these workflows must be sustainable for the communities to maintain and achievable within the current constraints of the codebase. We also hope to see opportunities to integrate between CSTs.
This is not a straightforward requirements gathering project. Lyrasis CSTs might share many of the same challenges and goals, but they each have different governance structures, sizes, procedures and group cultures to engage with. Prioritizing among many community ideas will be a challenge.
Lyrasis CSTs also share the same sustainability challenges as any open-source software projects. While most CSTs budget for some staff, development and community work is also performed with in-kind labor from employees who work at institutions that have a strong commitment to the technology. Depending on the community’s capacities and goals, adding any kind of new project, even one that will encourage growth in the long term, can be difficult. Communities’ energy, size and volunteer pools shift over time. We are designing customized community outreach and feedback plans that center each community’s current capacities and needs. We aim to design well-facilitated spaces where community members can directly and openly share knowledge.
By the end of January 2026, we will facilitate consensus with communities to approve a finalized list of integration workflows. We will build a requirements gathering plan that works within the development and community contribution practices of the CST applications as well as any other applications being considered.
The requirements will include:
- APIs and interfaces
- Data exchange
- Data mapping and transformations
- Error handling, logging and monitoring
- Security and data privacy
- Performance and scalability
- Documentation and training needs
This phase of the work will wrap up in summer 2026 with the final specifications ready for implementation.
What will these workflows look like? The possibilities are vast and exciting. If you are a member of one of these communities, stay tuned and follow the project site for ways to participate and share your ideas.
About Lyrasis
Lyrasis is a community-supported membership organization whose mission is to support enduring access to the world’s shared academic, scientific and cultural heritage through leadership in open technologies, content services, digital solutions and collaboration with archives, libraries, museums and knowledge communities worldwide.