2023-24 Metadata Standards sub-team Work Plan

Owned by Kevin Clair
Last updated: Sept 27, 2023
3 min read

Goals

  • Ongoing ticket review and communication with devs

  • Ongoing review of import/export mappings and the evolving landscape of pertinent standards

  • Support user communities by responding to tickets and/or soliciting feedback

  • Special projects

Specific Tasks or Projects

Use this section to identify the specific tasks or projects your sub-team intends to work on this year. Consider organizing them into ongoing and discrete tasks, if appropriate.

Ongoing/Recurring Tasks

Continue working with Development Prioritization on tickets relating to metadata standards support – writing user stories, advising on prioritization of metadata tickets, etc.

Action items: Metadata Standards sub-team members will attend DevPri meetings as they are able, when tickets of relevance to the team will be discussed. They will contribute to discussions about the tickets and report back to Metadata Standards as part of monthly meetings.

In-Progress Projects Carried Over from Last Term

Ensure that the MARC importer behaves as expected, according to subteam guidance and user feedback.

  • This is almost complete: ~95% done as of the end of last term.

Ensure that the MARC exporter behaves as expected, according to subteam guidance and user feedback.
Look into the EAD 2002 importer; establish whether ArchivesSpace’s reading of EAD 2002 is in line with the specification, and draft tickets for development for any issues we find.
Look into the EAD 2002 exporter; establish whether ArchivesSpace’s reading of EAD2002 is in line with the specification, and draft tickets for development for any issues we find.

Action items: At the October Metadata Standards sub-team meeting (if not earlier), we will return to speed on where we left off with MARC21 and EAD import/export tasks from the 22/23 term, and set expectations for ourselves regarding how much work we can complete during the 23/24 Metadata Standards term.

Establish good practices for how we share work products (importer/exporter tests, documentation, etc.)

Action items: Determine what our documentation needs are, what platforms are best suited for hosting different types of documentation, and how to tie them together in a way that is sustainable and easy for onboarding new team members.

  • Continue to use GitHub?

  • Continue to use Google Drive?

  • Use Atlassian in some way?

New Projects for This Term

Engage with the ArchivesSpace user community to identify concerns regarding metadata, and incorporate these into team activities.

Action items:

  • Collaboration with UAC on metadata conversations

  • Determine a process for bringing user questions or concerns about metadata back to this group (and to others in the Advisory Committees?)

  • Facilitate conversation about user engagement with metadata at the ArchivesSpace Online Forum in the spring (exact date TBD).

Out-of-Scope (Optional)

  • We considered the extent to which ArchivesSpace should support Records in Context (RiC). This was a carry-over from our 2022/23 work plan. We decided that because RiC is still a draft specification, there is no use case for ArchivesSpace to support it at this time, but will monitor developments.

Maintenance Activities (Optional)

Use this space to identify any actions or considerations necessary to support the maintenance of your sub-team’s tasks or projects once they have been completed. Is there documentation that needs to be created? Do future sub-team members need particular permissions to complete certain work?

Determine who “owns” our collaboration spaces (Google Drive and GitHub, primarily). Set up a plan for transferring ownership across terms, if needed.

Themes (Optional)

This section is optional, but a space to identify any underlying themes that run throughout multiple tasks or projects. This can also be a space to identify how you intend to approach your work this term. This can also be helpful when revisiting the workplan at the end of term with an eye towards the sub-team’s retrospective, or at the beginning of next term.

  • Greater engagement with the ArchivesSpace user community

    • Do the activities that Metadata Standards undertakes make sense for the larger community? Can they relate to our work, or is it mainly for the benefit of advanced/high-resourced ArchivesSpace users?

  • Documentation of how ArchivesSpace deals with metadata that it uses or does not use in import/export

  • “Regularizing” our work so that things that are heavy lifts now can become standard ongoing work for future iterations of the Metadata Standards team