2015-10-09 Meeting notes

Establish regular monthly meeting time

Seems like 2nd Friday at 1pm, Eastern works. Noah will send recurring meeting invite

• To date, Nathan Stevens (AS Migration Specialist) has provided support for AT and Archon migrations with some consultation from the group. Phil Suda and Chris Prom have been working with Nathan on troubleshooting issues with the ARchon migration script.  
• Nathan will no longer serve as Migration Specialist after October and so Brad expects some of the support/responsibility for AT and Archon migration to shift to this sub-team. It's a little unclear what this will look like (helping troubleshoot bugs and create JIRA issues?).
• The group should discuss at a future meeting and come to agreement about our specific role in supporting AT/Archon migration.
• Over the past year or so the migration sub-team has focused primarily on testing various import/export pathways with particular attention on EAD import/export. Members of the sub-team have submitted several issues in JIRA related to import/export.
• Brad and Cory Nimer have been doing some work on improving support for EAC import/export. They plan to update data maps and bring a revised specification to the membership along with user stories and some wireframes showing changes to the Agent record data model.

Review sub-team charge (skipped, whoops)

The Migration Sub-team ensures successful migration from Archivists Toolkit and Archon to ArchivesSpace for members and non-members through testing, support, documentation, bug fixes and enhancement prioritization. The sub-team also tests import and export of various formats to ensure successful "migration" of legacy data not in AT or Archon.

The group did not discuss the charge, but will discuss at a later meeting

Discuss possible areas of work, priorities, and work plan

Ideas from Brad:

• Schematron based import pathway

• Support for EAD3 (export following by import)

• METS export for Digital Objects (update to include events and rights)

Others?:

• Serving as "first responders" to User Group messages re: migration, import/export
• Develop Accession XML import schema (model after AT import schema)
• Digital Object import (batch import, linking to archival objects)
• Review data import/export maps (esp. MARC): http://www.archivesspace.org/importexport
• Archon Migration script?

Schematron work:

• Nathan's Schematron validation service: http://128.122.90.55:8083/SchemaMap/
• Mark Custer's Schematron file: https://github.com/fordmadox/schematrons/blob/master/ArchivesSpace-EAD-validator.sch
• Harvard's ArchivesSpace Checker: https://github.com/harvard-library/archivesspace-checker
• Harvard's schematronium (gem that runs schematron over 1 or more xml): https://github.com/harvard-library/schematronium

The group had a spirited discussion about issues surrounding the development of a schematron import pathway for EAD:

• Chris P. asked if we should consider removing some of the EAD import constraints imposed by ASpace
• Terry C. noted that AS will likely always support only a subset of all "valid" EAD for import
• Brad noted that DACS is the underlying ASpace data model, not EAD and that we shouldn't remove constraints imposed by DACS.
• Terry C. suggested the group could focus on:
  • 1) documenting AS constraints (while developing schematron).
  • 2) Providing guidance to AS community for fixing ASpace-invalid EADs
• Phil noted that constraints should be noted in Migration guidelines or alongside import/export maps: http://www.archivesspace.org/importexport
• Terry also suggested the group could provide documentation to community for how to run schematron validation using Oxygen
  • Mark Custer wrote a blog post (shared on the AS user-list) about using schematron w/ Oxygen: http://campuspress.yale.edu/yalearchivesspace/2015/07/22/validation-scenarios/
• Noah suggested that having a schematron web-service bundled as part of the ASpace app (available on the background jobs page in staff client?) might help smaller institutions without Oxygen or schematron expertise.
• The group seemed to agree that the schematron file should be maintained in the ASpace github repo
• Michael summarized Harvard's work on the ArchivesSpace-checker schematron service (link above). He will provide a link to the group when the service is live.
• Noah will identify possible action items related to schematron service and include in work plan

EAD3

• Brad described possible changes needed to the AS data model and import/export code to support EAD3 (esp. modeling physdesc and extent data)
• Terry C. agreed to provide some support in this area
• Chris P. noted that changes to the data model are not trivial and he would like to for the group to see a report on what changes are necessary before moving forward with EAD3 support. Getting existing import pathways working should be a priority.

Other possible areas of work

• Noah echoed Sally V.'s request for sub-team members to serve as "first-responders" to messages on the user list related to migration and import/export. The sub-team could also translate bugs reported on the user list into JIRA issues when appropriate.
• Brad indicated that developing an XML import schema for accession is a "would be nice" project, but not an immediate priority. Not sure how much would this would require if building on the existing AT accession XML import schema
• Brad agreed that confirming the accuracy of the data import/export mapping documents would be a useful project. See: http://www.archivesspace.org/importexport
  
  

Noah will try to draft a work plan based on these discussions and circulate to the group for feedback before/during the next call. Sub-team members should be thinking about how they can contribute.