Maintaining an open mind: sustaining open-source digital collections

After a slow and laborious migration process, the University of Louisville successfully migrated from proprietary digital collections software to an open-source Samvera Hyku solution. After our migration our over-enthusiastic customizations started to catch up with us and our users. Without sufficient funding and development support, even as an R1 institution, we are stuck unable to support our bespoke approach. Despite this we are persisting with Hyku, largely because of the supportive Samvera Community and its efforts to increase the sustainability of the system as a whole. From the perspectives of three mid-career librarians (serving as project manager, designer, and developer) and the early-career Metadata Librarian, we will discuss the importance of a) assessing resources before diving into an open-source project and b) cooperating with community partners in open-source software development and maintenance.