2019-06-27 Documentation agenda and minutes

Options:

• WordPress
• Confluence
• Github
• Something else? Ideas from the team are welcome.

Jasmine recommended Confluence due to its connections to the other council and sub-team pages that are already on the wiki, and the possibility of linking pieces of user documentation to existing Jira tickets. Its robustness is a plus. If it's possible to control membership access to the manual in Confluence, that would be her choice.

John also pointed out that it's easier to imagine how user access to the manual would be controlled in Confluence, vs. Github (against the spirit of Github) or WordPress.

Kevin also likes Confluence because it's where Denver hosts their documentation, and it's relatively easy for their staff to follow along with documentation there. The structure of it also maps well with other ArchivesSpace training materials available to members (training videos, etc.)

Our recommendation: Confluence, then Github, then (if we have to) WordPress.

• Results as Excel spreadsheet
• Results as CSV

Results indicate that most respondents use their local documentation as a complement to the User Manual, to indicate how certain elements are used locally and what local cataloging rules are. A few respondents noted that they wrote their own documentation in order to have a smaller body of documentation, not including the ArchivesSpace features they don't use.

Some indication that users are confused about the scope of the User Manual; it might be good in the next platform to have a "Guiding Principles" section or a scope note indicating what purpose the User Manual serves, what its scope is, and what it does not set out to do, so that users have a better sense of why they might want to maintain complementary local documentation.

The group discussed examples of shared documentation that might be useful for us as we think about how to integrate others' local documentation (if they want to share it) with the User Manual. Examples we discussed included the TAC Integrations documentation and the examples of API batch editing tasks that the ArchivesSnake development team collected prior to developing their Python library.

Generally we are waiting for the replacement for Madcap Flare for the User Manual before we think about how to act on some of the responses to the documentation writers' survey that we received.