2024-11-25 TAC meeting notes

5 min

Attendance ice breaker

@Austin Munsell

Icebreaker: What was your first job?

5 minutes

Program Update

@Christine Di Bella

• We are very close to a release candidate

• There is a webinar on Weblate coming up on 12/19. Weblate is used to translate the ArchivesSpace application into languages that the app itself doesn’t support yet. You may sign up via the link in the agenda below, or watch the recording afterward.

10 min

Sub-team Updates

Development Prioritization:
@Matt Strauss

Metadata Standards:
@Diane Biunno

Technical Documentation:
@Bonnie Gordon

Testing:
@Michelle Paquette

• Development Prioritization:

  • Reviewed 12 tickets at November meeting

  • Seeking community input on ANW-744: As an archivist, I want to view records created/updated by a particular userAwaiting More Information

• Metadata Standards: Metadata Standards has identified a new Vice Lead! Thank you, Frank Foss for volunteering. The sub-team discussed two Jira tickets at the November meeting. We also discussed tickets about MARC and EAD export behavior that were shared with us by the Multilingual Description Task Force.

• Technical Documentation:

  • Identified Vice-Lead: @Schmidt, Corey

  • Support transition to new platform from Jekyll for Tech Docs

  • Improve API documentation starting with jobs, search, and agents endpoints, and any changes from recent releases

• Testing:

  • Completed regression testing for Version 4.0.0

  • Held Regression Testing Debrief session to discuss what worked well, what needs improvement, what questions people had. Will use this information to improve the testing process.

10 min

TAC Business

@Austin Munsell

• Workplan themes:

  • Many sub-teams have reached a point of “term regularization” with regard to responsibilities and activities.

  • Community engagement through outreach on listservs, surveys, potential presentations at member forums continues to be priority for many sub-teams

  • Use of Jira tags as a method of information communication is common; ensure that leadership transition documentation includes training and ownership of this space for each sub-team’s use case.

• Thanks to Kevin and Regine for responding to questions over the last month on the ArchivesSpace Member List!

• Recent/Upcoming webinars:

  • Overview of ArchivesSpace and Membership - December 4, 2024

  • Weblate for ArchivesSpace Translation - December 19, 2024

• Trainer Corps survey closes December 2, 2024

• Quarterly Report to the ArchivesSpace Board submitted 11/25

• No TAC meeting in December; next meeting will be January 27

20 min

ASpace 4.0

@Brian Zelip @Thimios Dimopulos

Presentation Notes:

Recap and additional details from the presentation about ArchivesSpace 4.0 at the Member Forum this summer.

ASpace 4.0 features upgrades to app dependencies (bootstrap, jquery, ruby on rails, jruby, java). Helps to reduce technical debt and software vulnerabilities, and improve performance.

Enhancements to the public site include:

• moving the sidebar to the left side (customizable in config)

• improvements to the infinite scroll in resource views (choose between load-as-you-go and loading all records at once)

• highlighting search queries where they appear in search results

• the bulk archival object updater (moved from plugin to core code)

As mentioned by tech docs, the documentation is moving from Jekyll to a new platform where users can search and browse more easily. There is also guidance for volunteers who would like to write their own contributions to the docs. Both sites will live side by side for a while during the transition phase.

There are some new configuration settings in 4.0 but they are backwards-compatible with 3.x versions of the app. Java 8 is no longer supported in ASpace 4.0 but Java 17 is (Java 11 support remains).

There are changes in OAI identifiers and URLs are forms, to keep up with the standard; this is documented in the release notes.

Plugin developers should be sure to confirm that their plugins still work with the new version, because of all the changes to the PUI and to the software dependencies, libraries, and frameworks on which ASpace is built.

What will these updates enable the development team to do moving forward? Going forward these updates will free up time that was spent patching security holes to instead be spent on performance improvements to the application. These changes will also help to move toward fully automated test coverage, helping the development team to make more substantial changes to the application while being confident that nothing important in ArchivesSpace will break when they do so.

The tech docs documentation updates are unrelated to API/Yard documentation, but will help bring the tech docs in closer alignment with the rest of the archivesspace.org website. There are plans in the works to update the API/Yard docs to catch up to changes that have been made to the ArchivesSpace core code.

Please test the release candidates when they come out! Your use of ArchivesSpace may not be something that the development and testing teams have tried yet.

3 min

Open Mic

Suggestions from open mic: None!

2 min

Closing Notes

@Austin Munsell

Next TAC meeting: Monday, January 27, 2025 at 12pm EST/9am PST/7pm EEST/9:30pm IST