2022-1-24 ArchivesSpace Trainers Corps “Office Hour”

Date: January 24, 2022

Time: 2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT

Topic: Custom Reports in ArchivesSpace with demo of new custom reports functionality as of ArchivesSpace v3.2

Trainers in attendance:

Jodi Allison-Bunnell, Montana State University

Nancy Enneking, Getty

Noah Huffman, Duke University

Miloche Kottman, University of Kansas Libraries

Brittany Newberry, Atlanta University Center

Christine Di Bella, ArchivesSpace

Jessica Crouch, ArchivesSpace

This office hour will not be recorded. Notes from the office hour, including links to shared resources, will be provided below.

Agenda

Who

Notes

Agenda

Who

Notes

Welcome

Jessica Crouch

 

Demo - Custom reports and custom reports templates in ArchivesSpace

Jessica Crouch and Christine Di Bella

Christine provided context for the new custom reports functionality in ArchivesSpace which has been in development since 2018.

Jessica gave a demo of the new functionality.

ArchivesSpace Members can view the user manual documentation for custom reports at https://archivesspace.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ArchivesSpaceUserManual/pages/2914877469

You can view the new functionality at https://test.archivesspace.org/.
Username/password: admin/admin
Test it out and report any issues (How to Report a Bug )

 

Important things to keep in mind:

-Running custom reports is resource intensive, be mindful how how large your report is and how many linked records you are pulling in. It could over tax your system.

-To enable custom reports, you must ask your sysadmin or hosting provider to turn custom reports on in the config file. (Atlas Systems announced it would be turned “on” be default for their hosting clients.)

-To create, edit, delete or manage custom reports you must have the necessary permission enabled. This is already turned on for repository managers and archivists in the out of the box permission groups.

-To create a template, you can either go through the gear menu or create menu. (If you don’t have permission to manage templates, you won’t see the option in the gear menu.)

 

 

 

How we handle reports

All trainers

Nancy Enneking demoed Crystal Reports, which Getty uses for their custom reports

Noah Huffman discussed several custom reports plugins he had developed at Duke (GitHub - duke-libraries/archivesspace-duke-custom-reports: ArchivesSpace plugin to add custom reports to staff interface ) and highlighted some developed by Harvard (GitHub - harvard-library/harvard_aspace_reports: ASpace custom reports ) that are also useful

Miloche Kottman discussed University of Kansas’s used of Access reports and making use of data dumped out of ArchivesSpace

Brittany Newberry at the Atlanta University Center uses the canned reports in ArchivesSpace and also makes use of the ability to download various CSVs out of ArchivesSpace and massages that data. Like many users, there are lots of spreadsheets involved. Brittany and several other meeting attendees recommend Airtable as a great free tool.

Q&A/Discussion

Everyone

Many organizations make their custom reports available at GitHub - archivesspace/awesome-archivesspace

If you have added your own reports using the instructions at tech-docs , those reports will still be available and that will continue to function. Custom reports functionality is additive and doesn’t take away from other functions.