April 4, 2023

ArchivesSpace Virtual Member Forum - Session A

Registration: Closed

1pm UTC

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Welcome and Announcements
Jessica Crouch, Community Engagement Coordinator, ArchivesSpace 

Presentation recording

Coming Soon to ArchivesSpace

Spawning Digital Objects from Archival Objects
Don Smith, Developer, ArchivesSpace

Make Representative Functionality in Digital Objects 
Brian Zelip, Front End Developer, ArchivesSpace

1:30-2:00pm UTC

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Beyond Boxes: Managing Spaces and Containers in ArchivesSpace
Tiffany Cole, Kate Morris, and Grace Thomsen, James Madison University

Presentation recording

With a three-year, $95 million library renovation and expansion set to begin in May 2023 requiring a complete collections move in April 2023, James Madison University Special Collections embarked on a year-long project to establish greater intellectual and physical control of its processed collections as well as unprocessed backlog. Using ArchivesSpace’s container and location management modules, a graduate assistant in consultation with Special Collections staff assigned barcodes to more than 1,800 Top Containers, created and assigned more than 60 Container Profiles, merged Top Containers for boxed-with collections, remediated past local practice of “Locations as Top Containers,” and strategically created and assigned Location Profiles. In addition to the ArchivesSpace work, this project and impending renovation provided staff the space (and incentive) to finally deal with those pesky accessions, legacy collections, and orphaned materials that every repository has in its custody. As a result, staff selectively reappraised accessions; deaccessioned 97 cubic feet of duplicative and non-archival materials comprising trophies and awards, tchotchkes, newspaper clippings, and out of scope records; rehoused unprocessed accessions; and began moving towards an accessioning as processing approach to new acquisitions.

2:00pm-2:30pm UTC

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MARC to ArchivesSpace: Migrating Without Scripting
Sarah Newhouse, Science History Institute

Presentation recording

Before ArchivesSpace, all archival collections at the Science History Institute’s Othmer Library were described in our library catalog (Sierra), with at least a MARC record and potentially either an attached PDF or Microsoft Word document of some additional description (box and folder lists, inventories, etc.) of varying adherence to standards. We started using ArchivesSpace in 2017, but only used it to create EAD-compliant PDF finding aids, which were then attached to a MARC record in the library catalog, following previous practice. The Digital Preservation Archivist position was created in 2021, with one of its immediate goals being turning on and using the ArchivesSpace PUI for public finding aid access. As part of that process, we wanted to make the PUI the one-stop shop for all archival collections, which meant transporting over decades of MARC records from the Sierra library catalog into ArchivesSpace. This talk will describe our migration project, including the kinds of data clean-up that had to be done, troubleshooting tips, impacts on processing and description workflows, access considerations, and what tools we used (notably, not the API).

2:30pm-3:00pm UTC

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Three's Company: Sharing a Unified ArchivesSpace instance
Julia Corrice, Elizabeth Parker, and Katerina Dimitriadou-Shuster, Cornell University Library

Presentation recording
Presentation slides

Cornell University Library (CUL) contains three separate archival repositories: the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) and the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, located in Ithaca, NY, and the Weill Cornell Medical Center Archives, located in New York City. In January 2019, RMC implemented ArchivesSpace as their content management system; the Kheel Center and Weill are both currently in process of migrating into CUL’s ArchivesSpace instance. This presentation will discuss technical considerations of preparing for migration into an instance already set up for the needs of another repository, training for staff and archivists in geographically dispersed locations and with differing workflows, and issues of shared governance and documentation among all participating repositories.

5pm UTC

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5:05pm-6:00pm UTC

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6:00pm-6:30pm UTC

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From Cleanup to Ingestion: Migration of Indiana University Archives Accessions
Jeremy Floyd and Bri McLaughlin, Indiana University 

Presentation Recording
Indiana University Accessioning Documentation

Migrating data from outdated software is never simple. Indiana University’s ArchivesSpace instance is home to 30 repositories across 7 campuses. We migrated 3,000+ finding aids from all repositories in 2020. Indiana University exclusively used EAD for finding aid creation, which at least gave us a uniform format to import into ArchivesSpace. Accession records, however, were an entirely different situation. Most Indiana University repositories use different, unrelated methods of accession record creation. Many of the repositories have their own custom spreadsheet or word document template. However, University Archives at Indiana University Bloomington had been using AskSam for over 30 years to create and manage accession records. AskSam was a free form application adopted in the 1990s. While the application was ahead of its time 30 years ago, it no longer met our needs. The last version was released 15 years ago, meaning our collection managers have been using an application without support for almost as long. After implementing ArchivesSpace for finding aids, collection managers at Indiana University were very interested in the Accessions module as well. As can be imagined, migrating content from an application that hasn’t been updated in 15 years wasn’t as simple as exporting and importing into ArchivesSpace. This presentation will cover the process of migrating 7,000+ accession records from AskSam into ArchivesSpace using the bulk accession importer and supplemental API calls. We will discuss the lessons we’ve learned during this process including the significant amount of data cleanup that was required for a successful migration.

6:30pm-7:00pm UTC

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Accessioning Small Accruals More Efficiently via the API
Michelle Paquette, Smith College and Althea Topek

Presentation recording
Presentation Slides
API Scripts

Smith College's College Archives gets many small accruals each year, which can be time-consuming to accession and associate with their appropriate collections in ArchivesSpace relative to their size. In this presentation former Accessioning Archivist Althea Topek and current Metadata Archivist Michelle Paquette will discuss how Smith staff are using Airtable, the API, and a series of scripts to batch create agent records, accession records, archival objects records, and their associations to each other in one fell swoop.

3pm UTC

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ArchivesSpace Metadata Sub-team discussion

Join members of the ArchivesSpace Technical Advisory Council's Metadata sub-team for a discussion about using subject headings in ArchivesSpace.  Bring your use cases and preferred thesauri for a discussion of what you like about the subjects module and what you hope to see in the future. 

4pm UTC

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ArchivesSpace Board Discussion

Join members of the ArchivesSpace board for a discussion about the ArchivesSpace governance structure and functions. This is a great session for members newer to the ArchivesSpace community to learn about the program’s development and how to get involved.

5:00pm UTC

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ArchivesSpace Documentation Discussion

Liz Caringola, University of Maryland (Tech Docs), Margaret Turman Kidd, Virginia Commonwealth University (User Docs), Eden Orelove, Smithsonian Institution (User Docs)

Join members of the ArchivesSpace Technical Advisory Council's Technical documentation sub-team and the User Advisory Council's User documentation sub-team for a joint discussion on documentation related to ArchivesSpace.

In this session, learn about two types of ArchivesSpace documentation that will help you to get the most out of the system: 1) the User Manual, and 2) the Technical Documentation.

1) Have you ever wondered what *that* button does? Or how to use *that* strange records module you're currently not implementing? The ArchivesSpace User Manual is here to dispel the mystery. The User Documentation Team (part of the User Advisory Council) keeps the documentation up-to-date. Learn more about the manual and how it can supplement your in-house documentation.

2) The ArchivesSpace Technical Documentation isn’t just for developers. Members of the Technical Documentation team will present some examples of how archivists with any level of technical comfort might find this documentation useful for themselves or when communicating with their hosting provider, developer, or IT staff.