ArchivesSpace

ArchivesSpace is an open source, web application for managing archives information.  The application is designed to support core functions in archives administration such as accessioning; description and arrangement of processed materials including analog, hybrid, and born-digital content; management of authorities (agents and subjects) and rights; and reference service.  The application supports collection management through collection management records, tracking of events, and a growing number of  administrative reports.  The application also functions as a metadata authoring tool, enabling the generation of EAD, MARCXML, MODS, Dublin Core, and METS formatted data. 

ArchivesSpace is a program with a current staff of 2.75 FTE, a community of over 300 members, and three administrative groups—a Governance Board (elected), a Technical Advisory Council (appointed), and an Users Advisory Council (appointed)—and published Bylaws.  LYRASIS is the organizational home for ArchivesSpace. 

 Background

ArchivesSpace dates from June 2009 when representatives of New York University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of California San Diego, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation agreed to integrate the Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon into a single application in order to increase overall functionality within a single application and to optimize sustainability of the application.  The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided generous funding for the first two phases of the ArchivesSpace program.  A planning phase ran from January 2010 to June 2011, during which functional specifications were drafted, a business plan was formulated, and an organizational home was secured.  A development phase ran from July 2011 to September 2013, culminating in the release of ArchivesSpace 1.0 on September 30, 2013.  There have been nine releases of ArchivesSpace since the 1.0 release, all of which have served to both advance the integration of the Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon and to introduce new functionality not present in either of those precursor applications.

Blog stream

Customizing your ArchivesSpace EAD importers and exporters.

Chris Fitzpatrick posted on Mar 15, 2015

Recently, I had the privilege of hosting the ArchivesSpace developer house at Code4Lib 2015 http://code4lib.org/conference/2015in Portland, Or. It was great to meet real ArchivesSpace community members and talk about how they're using the application and what they'd like to see. Probably the most common request we hear relates to the EAD import and export, which was a big topic of conversation in Portland.…