ArchivesSpace Member Forum 2024
- Bailey-Grace Harrell
- Jessica Crouch
- Christine Di Bella
When:
Virtual workshop: August 7, 2024 at 11am ET/8am PT (find your local time)
In-person meeting: August 14, 2024 from 9:00am-12:30pm CT followed by a joint luncheon with Archive-It
Where:
Virtual workshop: Online; via Zoom
In-person meeting: Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library | Chicago, IL
400 S. State Street Chicago, IL 60605
Instructions for accessing the Chicago Public Library:
- Members of the ArchivesSpace Program Team will be stationed at the 401 S. Plymouth Court entrance of the building to greet and direct attendees to the registration table.
- To all attendees: The Lower-Level of the Library will be closed to the public during this event. Please wear your name tag at all times while in the Library so Security Officers can differentiate program attendees from the Library patrons.
Who Can Attend:
Individuals from ArchivesSpace member institutions only.
The ArchivesSpace Member Forum is open to individuals from ArchivesSpace member institutions only. To register, you must use an institutional email address associated with an ArchivesSpace member institution. Registrations using personal email addresses and addresses associated with non-member institutions will not be accepted.
Program:
Virtual Workshop: Creating and Editing Digital Object records in ArchivesSpace
Due to the impact of Tropical Storm Debby, this training has been rescheduled from its original date of August 7, 2024. This webinar will now be on August 21st at 11:00am-2:00pm ET/8:00am-11:00am PT (find your local time). If you registered for the original webinar, your registration has been transferred to the new webinar date. Note: Registration for the virtual learning opportunity and registration for the in-person forum on August 14 are separate. If you would like to attend this virtual learning opportunity, register via the link above. You do not need to attend the in-person forum to attend this training and registration for the August 14th in-person forum does not include access to this virtual event. | ||||||||||
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Creating and Editing Digital Object records in ArchivesSpace This training will cover a functional overview of the ArchivesSpace Digital Objects module, highlight what the module does (and doesn't do) to manage and facilitate digital object description and access, how to create and edit digital object records in ArchivesSpace, how to link digital object records to other records in ArchivesSpace, and how to add a representative image to a record in ArchivesSpace. | ||||||||||
In-person MeetingAugust 14, 2024 9:00am - 12:30pm CT Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library 400 S. State Street Chicago, IL 60605 Instructions for accessing the Chicago Public Library:
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| 9:00am ET | Registration Open Note: Chicago Public Library does not open until 9am | |||||||||
| 9:15am ET | Welcome | |||||||||
| 9:20am | Total Control: Using ArchivesSpace to Track Everything in Your Building In 2023, the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began preparing to move all of its collections (more than 63,000 archival boxes; 460,000 bibliographic titles; and 33,000 museum items) to offsite storage due to a planned building renovation. A Barcoding Task Team established workflows for barcoding archival boxes, adding the barcodes to existing top container records in ArchivesSpace using an adaptation of a script developed by North Carolina State University. The Barcoding Task Team also established workflows to track top container information and barcodes for bibliographic materials and museum items in ArchivesSpace for the purposes of this move project, as using ArchivesSpace to record this information proved easier than using the OPAC or the museum collections management software. These workflows are appropriate for institutions of all collection sizes, but are most relevant to institutions with large collections and staff members who know how to use the API. | |||||||||
| 9:50am | Description and Discovery of Carceral Records At Swarthmore we have a handful of collections that document incarceration, primarily related to Quaker worship groups in prisons. These records are sometimes created by people inside and sometimes by outside members or liaisons, but they are almost always donated to us by those outside the P.I.C. Carceral collections raise serious questions of privacy and power and equally serious (if less pressing) questions about subject access and preferred terminology. While I don't have any answers, I'll share some of my thoughts and decisions around description and would very much want to hear from others. | |||||||||
| 10:05am | Metadata Standards Community Survey: Preliminary Results This spring, the TAC Metadata Standards sub-team conducted a survey of the ArchivesSpace community to determine what standards they use in the application, what uses they have for those standards, and how ArchivesSpace might better support current and future metadata standards. In this session we will reveal the results of our survey, cover some of our early takeaways from those results, and talk about how what we learned will inform the Metadata Standards sub-team’s priorities in the upcoming term. | |||||||||
| 10:20am | Rejecting my rabbit nature: Letting go of the sprint and learning to manage ASpace on 2 hours per week Since its initial migration to ArchivesSpace in 2015, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Library has upgraded its instance twice. Both of those upgrades were designed as intensive summer projects, wherein the de-facto ASpace sysadmin (me) worked with one of the library’s IT staffers to research and explore the new version, migrate our production instance, and then introduce it to our other staff users. This upgrade model has proven increasingly unsustainable, as it relied on my increasingly inadequate tech skills, didn’t provide enough time either for testing beforehand or for documentation after the fact, and required dropping nearly all of my other work to focus on the upgrade. A sabbatical this year—with a couple of long-overdue upgrades of our ArchivesSpace instance as its focus—has provided the opportunity to rethink how I maintain the system. This presentation will explore the expected benefits of moving to a more leisurely pace, including both how and why I plan to formalize our average upgrade cadence (i.e. a new version every two or three years) and spread out what had been 12 weeks of fevered development across the cycle’s entire duration. | |||||||||
| 10:35am | Break | |||||||||
| 10:45am | ArchivesSpace Technical Update and AMA This session provides a technical update and Q&A with an ArchivesSpace developer. The high level overview reports on recent and ongoing upgrades to the ArchivesSpace codebase. The second half is dedicated to open-ended technical questions and discussions related to ArchivesSpace. | |||||||||
| 11:15am | Reparative Redescription and Metadata Migration at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Since 2020, the Technical Services unit at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has been identifying opportunities for reparative redescription in our existing records. To date, we have identified over 350 finding aids in need of redescription. We are now prepared to implement these updates; however, legacy descriptive metadata was not migrated to ArchivesSpace when UVA adopted the system in 2015. Ideally, we want all our metadata centralized in ArchivesSpace, but the labor required for this migration is currently prohibitive. Therefore, as an initial step, we have decided to focus on prioritizing reparative redescription. In my presentation, I will outline our strategy for updating descriptive metadata and migrating it from various legacy systems and formats into ArchivesSpace. | |||||||||
| 11:30am | Extending Your Search I have developed a few custom extensions that allow for batch searching and modifying of records in ArchivesSpace without the use of the API. This includes records with identifiers, keywords, and the manage top containers module. This presentation will demonstrate how I use these tools and leave time for discussion on how they might be modified, improved, and/or integrated into the interface. | |||||||||
| 11:45am | From Local to Lyrasis: NYPL's Journey from Local Hosting to Lyrasis Hosting for ArchivesSpace In this presentation, I will share the New York Public Library's (NYPL) journey from locally hosting our ArchivesSpace instance to partnering with Lyrasis for third-party hosting. Implemented nearly eight years ago, our ASpace instance was supported by our Digital and IT teams in collaboration with our former Metadata Archivist. Following the departure of the Metadata Archivist, we faced significant challenges in maintaining and updating our system due to limited internal technical support. This predicament led us to explore alternative solutions, culminating in our decision to migrate our ASpace instance to Lyrasis hosting. By late July, we formalized our partnership with Lyrasis, aiming to upgrade to the latest version of ASpace and address our customizations' complexities. This presentation will delve into our decision-making process, the anticipated benefits of third-party hosting, and the steps we are taking to ensure a smooth transition. I will also highlight the unique position we find ourselves in, as few institutions have made a similar switch, and discuss our excitement about the improvements and efficiencies we expect from this partnership. Attendees will gain insights into the challenges and considerations involved in moving from local to third-party hosting, the advantages of partnering with Lyrasis, and the importance of maintaining comprehensive documentation for customizations. This session aims to provide a valuable case study for institutions contemplating similar transitions and foster a discussion on best practices and shared experiences in the archival community. | |||||||||
| 12:00pm | Seeing the Forest, Not Just the Trees: Book Collections in ArchivesSpace In this presentation, I will discuss how the Vanderbilt Special Collections has begun using ArchivesSpace to describe book collections in addition to archival material. The hierarchical nature of ArchivesSpace allows us to go beyond the individual descriptions of volumes in the book catalog to showcase the context and collector’s arrangement, thereby providing added value for researchers and allowing them to approach each collection as a whole rather than in parts. Finally, treating each volume as a top container allows us to link books to shelf locations to help streamline pulling books from the stacks. | |||||||||
| 12:15pm | Request for ArchivesSpace community feedback: Vault Digital Preservation Service and ArchivesSpace In this lightning session, Bridget will give a brief overview of the Vault Digital Preserve Service developed by the Internet Archive and highlight feedback opportunities for ArchivesSpace community members about potential integration with Vault | |||||||||
| 12:20pm | Wrap up and lunch! | |||||||||
The in-person meeting on August 14, 2024, will not be livestreamed.
Both the in-person meeting and virtual workshop will be recorded. Recordings will be made available on the ArchivesSpace YouTube channel.
Photographs may be taken throughout the in-person forum and may be used for ArchivesSpace outreach and communications. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
Our Member Forum adheres to the ArchivesSpace Code of Conduct. We seek to provide a welcoming, fun, and safe community experience for everyone. The full text of the code of conduct is available at: https://archivesspace.org/archivesspace-code-of-conduct
Bailey-Grace Harrell, ArchivesSpace Program Team
Brittany Newberry, Georgia State University
Eleanor Blackman, Case Western Reserve University
Heather Lember, New York Public Library
Jessica Crouch, ArchivesSpace Program Team
Jessica Tucker, University of North Texas
Mary Pedraza, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
Shirin Khaki, New York Public Library
Steven Shelton, University of Tennessee Chattanooga
Post-Forum Evaluation: An evaluation of the forum is available at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/CL6JNC2