Technical Documentation

Description of the Technical Documentation Sub-team

The Technical Documentation sub-team (TechDocs) facilitates maintenance and enhancement of all ArchivesSpace technical documentation.

This page is intended to document the internal processes of the Technical Documentation sub-team to facilitate continuity between terms. It is currently under construction and will be filled out throughout the remainder of the 2022-2023 term.

Roles and Responsibilities for TechDocs Members

Maintain ArchivesSpace technical documentation in tech-docs Github repository

When new versions of ArchivesSpace are released, review release notes, providing edits/suggested changes to developers.
Identify documentation maintained by other sub-teams, link to it as appropriate, and avoid duplication of effort.
Review community-submitted issues and pull requests to the repository.
Perform yearly surveys of old documentation to provide edits/updates.
Review and manage Awesome ArchivesSpace.

Solicit feedback and contributions from the community

Encourage ArchivesSpace community to submit issues regarding documentation directly to the tech-docs repository or contact sub-team members via email to suggest improvements.
Monitor listserv for issues for which further documentation would be helpful, and create the appropriate documentation, or at least a stub for future documentation, in a timely fashion.

Perform outreach and make ArchivesSpace community aware of TechDocs

Promote TechDocs work and facilitate broad community knowledge by linking to relevant portions of documentation in listserv responses and other communications.
Suggest the inclusion of relevant links to TechDocs within documentation maintained by other sub-teams.

TechDocs Github Repository

About the Repository

The primary source of technical documentation for ArchivesSpace is the archivesspace/tech-docs Github repository (tech-docs repo). A public, more user-friendly version of the content is available at tech-docs.

The technical documentation is openly accessible and does not require ArchivesSpace membership, in contrast to the User Manual available through the ArchivesSpace Help Center. The two sets of documentation were created and are maintained in different environments due to this difference in access, as well as their different audiences.

Access and Permissions

All TechDocs sub-team members should have write permissions to the tech-docs repository and assigned to the archivesspace/tech-docs team. Before the beginning of each term, the sub-team lead should email Christine DiBella with the Github handles of the sub-team members to facilitate access.

Adding subteam members to Repository:

Select the menu icon in the upper left-hand corner, and select archivesspace/tech-docs under the “Teams” section:

2. Select the green “Add member” button.

3. Type ahead for the person’s GitHub username. Only people already added to the archivesspace team in GitHub can be added here. Email Christine if anyone is not already a member of that team.

4. Subteam members are encouraged to enable notifications from the repository via the Watch functionality.

5. Subteam members responsible for overall repository maintenance (i.e., subteam Leads and Vice Leads) should be assigned to the “Maintainer” level role. Within the techdocs Team page, select the user(s) with the checkbox, click the “1 member selected” icon, and “Change role.”

Pull Requests

In the context of Git repositories, a pull request is an event where a contributor asks the repository’s maintainer to review changes on an independent line of development that they want to merge into the main branch.

About Pull Requests

Pull requests to the repository should be reviewed and merged promptly.
Straightforward pull requests with no conflicts should be merged by the subteam Lead, or delegated to other TAC members if needed.
Pull requests with branch conflicts or content that warrants review by a developer can be identified by the Lead for a program developer to merge.
Draft pull requests cannot be merged, and can remain in the repository.

To merge a pull request:

Navigate to the techdocs repository.
Select “Pull requests.”

3. From the list of requests, select the specific pull request to merge.

4. Merge the commit(s) into the base branch by selecting “Merge pull request” (if this option is not shown, select “Create a merge commit” from the drop down menu)

5. If prompted, type a commit message.

6. Select “Confirm merge.”

Advisory Councils