As the central repository of archival information for many institutions, ArchivesSpace plays a critical role supporting the daily activities performed by special collections and archives institutions. However, it is only one piece of a larger software ecosystem employed by these institutions, and many institutions maintain several other applications that perform other tasks, such as digital asset management, patron fulfillment workflow management, etc. While the employment of so many systems can have a negative impact on staff efficiency due to increased training needs, disparate workflows, and duplication of work between systems, it doesn’t have to. Integrating these disparate systems together allows institutions to couple various systems together to create efficient workflows that minimize the duplication of work while maximizing the overall benefit of the entire set of applications.
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Importance of supporting the open-source software community
Open source software requires the support of its community to keep operating and moving forwards. ArchivesSpace, like all open-source software, depends to some extent on supporting institutions for ongoing sustainability as well as active development.
If your institution is an ArchivesSpace member, then they are already committed to supporting open-source software. However, there are ways to increase that support that benefit both your institution as well as the broader ASpace community such as developing new integrations which can be shared with other community members. The projects work best when they reinforce your institution’s mission and values while helping to meet your institution’s business needs. Additionally, collaborating with another institution on an integration can help you fulfill your needs while giving back to the open source community at the same time.
Integration Scenarios
The following is a list of various in-progress and planned integration scenarios.
Digital Preservation Systems
Some ArchivesSpace institutions make use of digital preservation systems like Archivematica or Preservica to for ingest. The descriptive information in ArchivesSpace should be able to aid in appraisal and arrangement, and can replicate this data in digital preservation systems. Furthermore, institutions can write “location” information for digital objects back to ArchivesSpace. In fact, a number of digital preservation integrations already exist.
Content Publication Systems
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We understand that the integrations scenarios we described above do not encompass the entire universe of possible ArchivesSpace integrations. For example, the Integrations sub-team has identifified identified rights management systems and reporting systems as scenarios for possible growth. If you have more integrations, we’d love to hear about them.
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