ArchivesSpace Online Forum 2020




Thanks to all who joined us for our second ArchivesSpace Online Forum. We were thrilled to have so many of you with us at some point over the four days.

Recordings, presentation slides, notes, and other materials for each session are available in the program below.  

If you attended any part of the Online Forum, please take a few minutes to fill out an evaluation: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QVY9CBB

Thanks for your interest in ArchivesSpace and for being part of our community. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

When:  
May 18-21, 2020

May 18, 2020 – 4pm-7pm UTC (find your local time I add to calendar)

May 19, 2020 – 5am-8am UTC (find your local time I add to calendar)*

May 20, 2020 – 4pm-7pm UTC (find your local time I add to calendar)

May 21, 2020 – 5am-8am UTC (find your local time I add to calendar)*

*For those attendees in the Western United States, portions of events occurring on May 19 and May 21, 2020 will occur in the nights of May 18 and 19, 2020.

Where:

All online via Zoom, with opportunities to join via computer or phone

First time Zoom users, view our Zoom cheatsheet for attendees.
First time Zoom presenters, view our Zoom cheatsheet for presenters.

Who Can Attend:

Anyone using or interested in using ArchivesSpace. Registration required.



Program:

May 18, 2020
Topic or Presentation

4:00pm UTC
(find your local time)

Welcome and announcements
Jessica Crouch, ArchivesSpace

4:05pm-5:00pm UTC
(find your local time)

We’re on the Road to Somewhere: Navigating Your ArchivesSpace Implementation 

Recording
Presentation Slides

This presentation will focus on what institutions should consider when starting an ArchivesSpace implementation, including creating a project plan for the process and tools/resources for importing legacy data, training, and engaging with the ArchivesSpace community.

Presenter:
Anne Marie Lyons, Atlas Systems 

Small Group Discussions:

Information on how to enter these small group discussions will be provided at the beginning of the session in the primary Online Forum Zoom room.

Breakout discussions are not recorded.

Sharing EAD with Regional Aggregators: Online Archive of California (OAC) Case Study
Presentation Slides

Christine Kim and Adrian Turner, California Digital Library

ArchivesSpace and your DAMs
Melissa Nerino, Industrial Archives

Using ArchivesSpace to manage artifacts and single items

Francesca Pitaro and Sarit Hand, AP Corporate Archives

5:00pm-5:15pm UTC
(find your local time)

Break

5:15pm-5:35pm UTC
(find your local time)

Three-Phased Implementation at UNC-Chapel Hill

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides

The Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is implementing ArchivesSpace in three phases:
1. Migration of accessions data from Archivists’ Toolkit
2. Migration of locations data from Microsoft Access
3. Migration of finding aid data from locally coded EAD
Phase 1 was completed in October 2019 and Phase 2 was completed in April 2020.

In this presentation, we will explain why we chose to implement in this order, how we migrated locations before migrating the finding aids, and the pros and cons we have encountered along the way. We will also share our future plans for migrating the finding aids.


Presenter: 
Dawne Lucas, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

5:35pm-6:05pm UTC
(find your local time)

ArchivesSpace for Reference

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides

ArchivesSpace for Reference focuses on how archivists can make their collections more accessible through the utilization of ArchivesSpace. Attendees will learn about how customization of the public user interface can help aid researchers. The session will delve into how archivists can maximize research through robust metadata in ArchiveSpace. Attendees will have access to resources to help with customization, plug-ins, and integration to make ArchivesSpace more user friendly.


Presenters: 
Melissa Nerino, Industrial Archives
Brittany Newberry, Atlanta University Center

6:05pm-6:15pm UTC
(find your local time)

Break

6:15pm - 7:00pm
(find your local time)

Lightning Presentations: ArchivesSpace and COVID-19

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides_Radically Altering Plans for a Telecommute Environment
Presentation Slides_Little Boxes Not the Same

In this session, archivists will highlight ways they've adapted their use of ArchivesSpace, their archival workflows and plans or their collecting initiatives in response to COVID-19.  An open discussion will follow.

If you would like to present on the work you are doing during this time, email jessica.crouch@lyrasis.org.

Moderator: Jessica Crouch

6:15pm-6:30pm: 
Radically Altering Plans for a Telecommute Environment: How One Large Academic Library is Implementing ArchivesSpace
Bailey Hoffner, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Special Collections

Covid-19 has radically changed most special collections work environments. The initial nine-month plan to begin implementing ArchivesSpace at the University of Oklahoma (OU) – completed just prior to receiving stay-at-home orders – had to be immediately altered to accommodate the new telecommute environment. We went from having an extended planning period, to a plan-as-you-go model. This has obviously been a challenging shift, but has had a number of positive benefits. While always aiming towards the same goals of providing better, standardized access to information about our collections, we’ve been able to provide meaningful work for special collections staff that have found themselves away from the collections that normally fill their days. We have also been able to onboard a number of other library staff members whose day-to-day work was limited by an inability to be “in the office.” Thanks to the number of people now dedicated to this project, our timeline for near-complete implementation of ArchivesSpace has been drastically shortened: from a process that might have taken 2-3 years, to one we hope to complete before January 2021. Other benefits will be discussed, as well as tools we have used for remote project planning, data clean-up, and ingest of legacy finding aids.

6:30pm-6:45pm:
Little Boxes Not the Same: Revisiting Container Profiles
Rachel Searcy, New York University

ArchivesSpace versions 2.7.1 introduced the ability to merge container profiles. This session will focus on a New York University project to analyze and merge our container profiles, as well as a larger effort to reassess the local implementation of this functionality to improve archivists’ use of the system. This presentation will describe the processes for exporting and analyzing container profiles, merging decisions, the concrete improvements this has on a variety of archival activities, and the benefits to revisiting original implementation strategies. 


May 19, 2020
add to calendar
Topic or Presentation

5:00am-6:00am UTC 
(find your local time)

Welcome and Announcements

ArchivesSpace Live Demo and Q&A

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides

In this session, Jessica Crouch (ArchivesSpace) will demonstrate the key functions of the ArchivesSpace application.  A brief Q&A session will follow.

6:00am-6:50am UTC 
(find your local time)

Crosswalking ArchivesSpace

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides

Presenter:
Christine Di Bella, ArchivesSpace

Using an archives information management system like ArchivesSpace offers an opportunity to more easily achieve standards compliance and exchange information with many other systems. But what if the standards ArchivesSpace is based upon aren’t the standards you use (or want to use)? What if the ArchivesSpace interfaces aren't in a language in which you or your users are most comfortable? Christine will discuss some work that has been done to crosswalk ArchivesSpace to standards like ISAD(g), as well as general principles for using ArchivesSpace in conjunction with other descriptive standards. This session will also offer an opportunity to offer ideas related to expanded standards and language support, and introduce a new project to crowdsource translations.

6:50am-7:00amBreak

7:00am-8:00am UTC 
(find your local time)

Show Us Your Implementation

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides_ArchivesSpace in Cambridge: a consortial approach
Presentation Slides_Implementing ArchivesSpace at University of Edinburgh
Presentation Slides_Implementing ArchivesSpace at Bodleian Libraries


A selection of presentations from ArchivesSpace users introducing their particular implementation of ArchivesSpace, current implementation hurdles, lessons learned and tools they've developed to make their lives easier.

Moderator: Venkat Srinivasan, National Centre for Biological Sciences

7:00am-7:15am: ArchivesSpace in Cambridge: a consortial approach Natalie Adams, University of Cambridge

This presentation will cover setting up an instance of ArchivesSpace for Cambridge University Library and external partners, local modifications and migration tools for legacy datasets.

7:15am-7:30am: Aline Brodin, Edinburgh University

This presentation will cover the implementation of ArchivesSpace at the University, which was the first European institution to adopt it in June 2015. The project team was composed of digital developers and archivists, led by Claire Knowles, then Library Digital Development manager, and Grant Buttars, then Deputy University Archivist. The presentation will give an overview of the implementation process, expanding briefly on data migration (including resources, accessions, and authorities) and online delivery of catalogues, and will present the work which is currently in progress to integrate IIIF into ArchivesSpace.


7:30am-7:45am: Matthew Neely, University of Oxford

Matthew Neely is a Senior Archivist at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, will cover Oxford's adoption of ArchivesSpace and the massive work they have done to implement both the ArchivesSpace staff user interface and public user interface at the  Bodleian Library. 


7:45am-8:00am: Q&A

May 20, 2020
add to calendar
Topic or Presentation

4:00pm UTC
(find your local time)

Welcome and announcements
Jessica Crouch, ArchivesSpace

4:05pm-4:45pm UTC
(find your local time)

Configuring your ArchivesSpace Implementation

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides

In this session, Anne Marie Lyons (Atlas Systems) will highlight ways you can configure your ArchivesSpace implementation from within the ArchivesSpace staff user interface.  Anne Marie will highlight configuration options for features like repository and user preferences, templates, default values, RDE, managing controlled vocabularies, user-defined fields, tool tip editing; and data tips for using the ASpace import templates.

Presenter: Anne Marie Lyons, Atlas Systems

4:45pm-5:45pm UTC
(find your local time)

Adapting ArchivesSpace for internal workflows and processes

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides_CalTech People Project
Presentation Slides_Simple Integrations Between ArchivesSpace and Ex Libris’ Alma/Primo
Presentation Slides_Mixed Bag: Describing and Publishing a Collection of Open and Restricted Born-Digital Records using Digital Objects

In this session, repositories will highlight ways they've adapted or integrated ArchivesSpace into their institutional workflow and practices.

Moderator: Anne Marie Lyons, Atlas Systems

4:45pm-5:00pm 

The Caltech People Project
Mariella Soprano, California Institute of Technology
Tommy Keswick, California Institute of Technology

This presentation will cover the Caltech People project. The aim of the project is to create an authority file of names for individuals that are important to Caltech. We decided that using Agents in ArchivesSpace will provide the best institutional home for this data and functionality. Currently we have identified approximately 10,000 names to track and fewer than 1,000 already exist as Agent records. We have compiled most of the names from the campus directory and our institutional repositories, which contain student theses and faculty papers. There have been a number of steps in the process completed already, such as evaluating the idea with many stakeholders in the Library and the Archives, mapping our existing spreadsheet data structure into the data structure of Agents, and deduping names that appear more than once. We have begun writing scripts to handle the one-time data import into ArchivesSpace by using the API and the ArchivesSnake tool. Workflows for ongoing data collection have yet to be developed, as concentrating on the initial import will give us a starting point. We will talk about some of our mapping decisions and how we are using the Agents data structures to function as the authority file. We will also give a brief overview of the Caltech People project and how the ArchivesSpace component lays a foundation for a larger goal. We might also speculate on future staff workflows with an ear to community input.


5:00pm-5:15pm 

Simple Integrations Between ArchivesSpace and Ex Libris’ Alma/Primo
Austin Munsell, University of Oregon

Two years ago, the University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) migrated from Archivists Toolkit to ArchivesSpace and implemented use of Ex Libris’ Alma/Primo for all patron registration, circulation and inventory tracking. SCUA’s tandem implementation of these systems led to the development of a number of small integrations to improve efficiency and synchronize data between these ArchivesSpace and Alma/Primo. Many of these integrations are actively used by SCUA students and staff on a daily basis. This presentation will cover two of these integrations, both developed using Postman, an API development platform: 1) A request/location integration that appends location information pulled from ArchivesSpace to patron requests in Alma, which are used to generate pull slips; 2) A shelf reading tool that simultaneously links barcoded top containers found in the SCUA stacks to locations in ArchivesSpace and clears any transit or process statuses from these items in Alma.

5:15pm-5:30pm 

Mixed Bag: Describing and Publishing a Collection of Open and Restricted Born-Digital Records using Digital Objects
Denise Rayman, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis

Arranging and describing collections with mixed open and restricted content can be tricky, and especially tricky when working with born-digital records. Likewise, as with physical material it is often not practical to describe born-digital material to the item level. This presentation will show a method of representing both the openly accessible and restricted born-digital material within a single collection. The method uses folder-level description combined with the published/unpublished feature in ArchivesSpace’s digital objects. This provides a record for all born-digital files in the collection, with a public link to the repository for open material, and a hidden digital object accessible from the staff interface only. This method balances the need for basic description of restricted content while providing privacy to the donor’s materials, and provides maximum clarity for researchers in what is accessible and what is not. It also allows staff to quickly find and access the material when needed, and any temporarily restricted material can be published and unrestricted easily at a later date. The presentation will show this method using a DSpace repository and DSpace’s published/unpublished feature for objects, but it is applicable to other systems as well.  

5:30pm-5:45pm - Q&A

5:45pm-6:00pm UTC 
(find your local time)
Break

6:00pm-7:00pm UTC
(find your local time)

Introduction to the ArchivesSpace API and ArchivesSnake

Presentation Recording
Presentation Slides


In working with ArchivesSpace, there comes a time in everyone’s working life where one needs to interrogate their data or make changes across a large part or all of their collection.  While ArchivesSpace has some affordances built in for bulk editing and reporting, its API can be an invaluable tool, able to (with effort) interrogate and alter any piece of data in the system.  Migrations, custom reporting/analysis, bulk edits or deletions, integrations with other software; familiarity with the API makes all of these and more possible (if not necessarily easy).

This presentation will hopefully provide you with some of the context necessary to get started working with the ArchivesSpace API, and demonstrate with examples usage of the API using ArchivesSnake library, a Python library specifically designed to reduce the effort required to write scripts interacting with ArchivesSpace via its API.

Presenter:
Dave Mayo, Harvard University

May 21, 2020
add to calendar

Topic or Presentation

5:00am-5:05am UTC 
(find your local time)

Welcome and Announcements
Jessica Crouch, ArchivesSpace

5:05am-6:00am UTC 
(find your local time)

Introduction to the ArchivesSpace API and ArchivesSnake (recorded May 20)

In working with ArchivesSpace, there comes a time in everyone’s working life where one needs to interrogate their data or make changes across a large part or all of their collection.  While ArchivesSpace has some affordances built in for bulk editing and reporting, its API can be an invaluable tool, able to (with effort) interrogate and alter any piece of data in the system.  Migrations, custom reporting/analysis, bulk edits or deletions, integrations with other software; familiarity with the API makes all of these and more possible (if not necessarily easy).

This presentation will hopefully provide you with some of the context necessary to get started working with the ArchivesSpace API, and demonstrate with examples usage of the API using ArchivesSnake library, a Python library specifically designed to reduce the effort required to write scripts interacting with ArchivesSpace via its API.

Presenter:
Dave Mayo, Harvard University

6:00am-6:45am UTC
(find your local time)

Configuring your ArchivesSpace Implementation (recorded May 20)

In this session, Anne Marie Lyons (Atlas Systems) will highlight ways you can configure your ArchivesSpace implementation from within the ArchivesSpace staff user interface.  Anne Marie will highlight configuration options for features like repository and user preferences, templates, default values, RDE, managing controlled vocabularies, user-defined fields, tool tip editing; and data tips for using the ASpace import templates.

Presenter: Anne Marie Lyons, Atlas Systems

6:45am-7:15am UTC
(find your local time)

Wrap up and final questions
Code of Conduct

Our Online Forum forum adheres to Code4Lib’s CodeofConduct4Lib. We seek to provide a welcoming, fun, and safe community experience for everyone. The full text of the code of conduct is available at: http://bit.ly/coc4lib.

Evaluation

Online Forum Evaluation: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QVY9CBB

Working Group Members
  • Regina Carra, American Folk Art Museum
  • Anne Marie Lyons, Atlas Systems
  • Melissa Nerino, Industrial Archives & Library
  • Francesca Pitaro, AP Corporate Archives
  • Mariella Soprano, California Institute of Technology
  • Venkat Srinivasan, Archives, National Centre for Biological Sciences
  • Jessica Crouch, ArchivesSpace