Prepared by Austin Munsell (outgoing TAC Chair), July 2025

Overview

At the outset of the 2024-2025 term, TAC leadership set two priorities drawn directly from the previous year’s retrospective that were largely focused on sustainability and continuity:

1. Preserve what worked – continue the interactive meeting model blending brief status updates with a mix of subteam breakout discussions and guest speakers.

2. Strengthen the leadership pipeline – identify sub-team vice-leads much earlier in the year so they can shadow, learn, and share the workload before stepping into lead roles. Midway through the year, an optional TAC and Cross-Council leads meeting was also established following a request from sub-teams, contributing to the strengthening of TAC and Cross-Council subteam leadership.

Over the course of the term, these priorities guided meeting agendas and support for TAC members.

Gratitude and acknowledgement to Regine Heberlein (TAC Vice Chair), Rebecca Baugnon (UAC Chair), Mary Pedraza (UAC Vice Chair for the first half of the term), and Katerina Dimitriadou-Shuster (UAC-Chair elect for 2025-2026, who began participating in leadership at the end of Spring) for their professional and collegial coordination and support throughout term.

Goals

• Keep meetings engaging and low burden for TAC members

• Identify vice-leads early and grow future chairs over the course of the term

Leadership Activities (Chair and Vice Chair)

• Engaged early and often with the ArchivesSpace development team to identify guest speakers on a range of topics for TAC meetings.

• Maintained and updated council documentation to reflect changes in responsibilities for TAC leadership and subteams.

• Re-initiated standing optional monthly TAC and Cross-Council leads meetings at the request of subteam leads.

What Went Well

(Direct Feedback from TAC Retrospective Meeting, June 2025)

• Developer / TAC alignment – Members indicated that direct interaction with the development team led to a better understanding of development priorities and capacities.

• Optional lead meetings – Viewed as productive yet lightweight.

• ArchivesSpace Development Liaisons to Subteams - Many TAC members indicated that the presence of representatives from the ArchivesSpace development team participating in subteam activities was a significant benefit to the work of these teams.

• Skill growth – Members across the council indicated they became stronger ticket writers, testers, and documentation reviewers as a result of their service.

• First-year support – Orientation, documentation and structured meetings seem to be easing some of the first year whirlwind (while not eliminating the overwhelming experience).

Continuing Needs and Ideas

(Direct Feedback from TAC Retrospective Meeting, June 2025)

• Documentation overview in meeting agendas - Members indicated that they would like to see links to important TAC documentation and resources at the top of TAC meeting agendas. This would probably be a relatively easy addition to the TAC meeting template.

• More subteam collaboration - Increasing the amount of interaction/knowledge sharing between subteams was identified as a potential goal for the coming year. This may be a natural outcome of the increase in the overall number of TAC members over the last two years, resulting in fewer members participating in more than one subteam. Potential avenues for collaboration could include more cross-team breakout sessions in TAC meetings or facilitating separate meetings/trainings outside of standing TAC meetings on topics of interest across subteams (if there is capacity and interest).

• Demonstrations of Institutional ArchivesSpace Instances - TAC members indicated that they would like to see how other member institutions are using ArchivesSpace. This could take the form of demonstrations by members in TAC meetings or possibly documentation sharing across membership.

• Training opportunities for TAC Members - Repeating a theme from previous years, multiple members indicated a desire for more technical trainings as part of TAC membership. Topics listed included “how to stand up your own instance of ASpace, looking at backend logs, basics of plugin anatomy, basics of Ruby, how to submit a GitHub pull request”. Such trainings may be outside the scope of what ArchivesSpace can offer.

Leadership for 2025-2026

Chair: Regine Heberlein

Vice Chair: Michelle Paquette