2020-01-21 Meeting notes

Debrief of Yale meeting

• (From email): Julia and I met with archivists at Yale (Mark Custer, Alicia Detelich, and Eve Neiger) and they demonstrated their ArchivesSpace public interface instance.  They worked with Hudson Molongolo to create a different approach for the Collection Organization tab which resolves some accessibility and usability challenges with the PUI.  (Example: https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/11339/collection_organization)  The code is currently on github and the intent would be to see whether there is broader community interest in this PUI evolution for possible inclusion in the core code.  

  Since then, I’ve reached out to Jessica Crouch and Eve will be joining in on the community open call on Wednesday.  I’ve also reached out to Maggie and I’m hoping that Alicia can discuss the pui at the joint council meeting on February 7^th.  An action item for this team is to just explore their pui and please let me know what you think of it.  Besides the collection organization tab, they’ve done a lot of tweaks according to their usability testing that seem really exciting.  For example, they streamlined the PDF process to solely generate from EAD, which would mean not needing to maintain two sets of stylesheets like currently.  They have PDFs of their finding aids generated during night hours, to be easily and quickly accessed during the day.

• Question: how to get more existing code into the core code.  For example, some well-resourced institutions may contract with someone to develop a tool or refine something, but there isn’t an established way to have the community decisively vote on something. Should Usability spearhead this? Dev. Pri.? or the Councils? Or someone else?

When everyone has a chance, take a look at the Yale PUI customization with their single scroll-bar [instead of 2-3 scroll bars!]. Curious about if this is good for accessibility and user-friendliness.

This will be presented/demonstrated at the community open call on 1/22.

Yale folks will make a Jira ticket and people can comment on that [since there’s no real voting mechanism].

Note: does conflict with discussion of moving organization window to left of screen [F layout].

Update on mobile phone access project

Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jW1oqm6RaNlIp9Mg4VtnRwLnxiUxKqUV8_e0PtXf2qM/edit?usp=sharing

Remember to provide screenshots/comments about mobile version of AS interfaces in the shared document [and Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18V7hz6yUNzYybtMw28A36ge0xMZDkJBy ] before the Usability meeting on 2/4. Kate has a student [without much archival research experience] who has tested it so far, and put comments into the shared document.

Brittany shared her screen with some screenshots of existing issues she has run into with the mobile interface view.

Althea shared some details/screenshots about staff user interface side.

Lydia shared thoughts from the SIEWG and visual layout document; idea for showing locations from SUI [like Archon was able to do]. Lydia will create a Jira ticket about it.

Brittany will create a Jira ticket that we can discuss/comment on during/after the 2/4 meeting. [One ticket that may cover both SUI/PUI for now.]

Additional topics?

Discussion about notions of putting together a steering committee potentially to manage voting.

Discussion about having UAC meeting once a month vs. every other month.

Lydia brought up the idea of learning more about what plug-ins could potentially work toward incorporating into the core code of AS. [What institutions have developed good plug-ins? What would the process be to petition or nominate plug-ins into the core code?] Awesome ArchivesSpace github repository exists as a resource.

Brainstorm other topics for discussion with UAC meeting [or UAC/TAC joint meeting].