2015-10-06 Meeting notes

The integration sub-team supports integration work the ArchivesSpace program is engaged with. Currently, such integrations include Aeon, Archivematica, and Social Networks and Archival Context, but will include others. Members of this sub-team work with the ArchivesSpace developers and staff of other products to determine and help complete the work necessary to complete an integration of ArchivesSpace with some other product. Such work may include determining scope, writing specifications, and testing implementations.

• Archivematica and ArchivesSpace

RAC is working with Artefactual on this. They are almost done with automatic creation of DIPs based off of a CSV with digital object filenames and AS ref_id. This works best for legacy digitized materials. In the future, they are also interested in building out the AS rights module to make it more in line with PREMIS rights.

Bentley is also working with Artefactual on this. The key piece here is the development of an Appraisal and Arrangement tab within Archivematica that will, among other things, allow archivists to link transfer content to specific ArchivesSpace resources.

• ArchivesSpace and repository (e.g., DSpace, Hydra or Islandora)

The Hydra Archivists Interest Group has explored this, and created Hydra ArchivesSpace Integration Features.

Bentley is also working on this. Once AIPs are created in Archivematica and sent to DSpace, the handle will be automatically added to the appropriate digital object in AS.

Tulane is also working on this. The idea is to bring EAD into Islandora to display finding aids. AS would be used to manage accessions and resources. Archivists would export EAD from AS and batch ingest it into Islandora via the API.

• Aeon and ArchivesSpace

This was discussed at the Northeast Aeon Users' Group in June and SAA in August. The Container Management plug-in is a possible place for integration. This work was to be led by Aeon members and conducted initially on the Aeon mail list. However, the work is not getting traction at Atlas due to there not being substantial intersection of Aeon and AS deployments and Atlas not wanting to involve communities greatly in this effort.

Currently two institutions are doing local Aeon integrations:

1. USC has done a basic integration. Here's the code and here it is in action.
2. RAC is looking at something a little more advanced. This involves shopping cart functionality as well as an API call against AS to populate locations when available into an Aeon request.

RAC and Bentley are Aeon users now, so they're interested. According to this thread, so are Yale, CalTech, Illinois, Miami, Harvard and Maryland.

This also raises the question of how AS might provide request services to member organizations that do not use Aeon.

• Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) and ArchivesSpace

In this integration, AS would integrate with a national database of archival authority records that IATH and NARA are funded to stand up.

BYU is looking into building out the agents module that's currently available to prepare for integration with the SNAC database using finding aids and MARC records. This work is still in process and BYU and ArchivesSpace are building out specifications. AS still needs to be fully compliant with EAC and MARC. Ideally, AS could be used to read and write authorities to this database, but also allow researchers to browse relationships among authorities.

• BitCurator or Archivematica and ArchivesSpace

This is a grant request spearheaded by Educopia, AS and BitCurator. It will work with about a dozen partner institutions to flesh out different types of workflows among the three products (and the many combinations between them), document them, and come up with scripts to implement them. Executive summary was finished last week.

• Others

Dartmouth is working on a local integration with their records management software.

This should start with the fundamental question of what we even mean (and what we don't) by integration.

We then discussed a two-pronged approach to creating some general guidelines for integration:

1. Outlining where/how AS could be integrated (already), highlighting/defining functional integration points, something like this except not specific to Hydra.
2. "Reverse engineering" integrations based on existing work being done with Aeon (or maybe not, given Brad's update), Archivematica and SNAC. These would also serve as example integrations for future reference.

These guidelines will need to take into consideration technical, functional and philosophical (if that's the right word) aspects of AS and systems it may integrate with.

AS will sometimes need to be extended to make integrations work. It was noted that "emailing the list" as a number of us did regarding extending PREMIS rights in AS didn't get a whole lot of response (with the exception of the usual suspects). The question of how these issues should be addressed on this sub-team and with the community at-large arose.

We will return to work on specific integrations (that is, determining scope, writing specifications, and testing implementations, like our charge says) in the future.